


it was daylight when you woke up in your ditch

by uwaaaah



Category: Captain America (Comics), Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: (except like. platonically.), Alternate Universe - "oh my god they were roommates", Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Existential Crisis, Gaslighting, Gen, Identity Issues, Identity Porn, Latveria (Marvel), MCU/616 mashup, cameos by avengers and invaders and bucky's sister, cap's overwrought bucky-angst, clandestine spy bullshit, political upheaval as backdrop for existential crises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:55:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 50,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26111467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uwaaaah/pseuds/uwaaaah
Summary: Upon waking up in the future, Steve is given many things: an apartment, a job at SHIELD, and (most miraculously) Bucky, revived from the ice just like Steve himself.But there's something off that he can't quite figure out. Steve's work at SHIELD seems counterproductive and strange. There's a political uprising that he thinks is connected, but no one will acknowledge it. There's an infamous assassin that Black Widow knows, but refuses to tell Steve about. And he can't tell if Bucky is behaving strangely, or if maybe, he never knew Bucky as well as he thought he did.Or: the one where the Winter Soldier goes undercover as Bucky Barnes to keep Captain America under control.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Natasha Romanov, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers, James "Bucky" Barnes & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 43
Kudos: 30





	1. Chasing It Down

**Author's Note:**

> Note that this fic is set in a 616/MCU fusion. As a general rule of thumb: if it happened in the past, it's based on 616. If it's happening in the present, it's pulling from the MCU. Because I love the bones of the CA:TWS movie, and I love 616 corn country jackass Bucky. _my city now._

“Sir, one of our men under one of Fury’s command has been posted to watch guard at the infirmary. He says it’s Captain America.”

“Captain America? What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, it’s Captain America. Details are still slim, but apparently he’s just been found alive. Looks like he’s straight out of the history books. He’s under watch while he recovers, but rumor has it that Fury’s got plans for him.”

“He does, does he? Make sure that whatever happens with him, we know about it. This is too big for us to pass up.”

* * *

Steve Rogers thinks he might vomit.

Yesterday, he and Bucky died trying to stop an experimental Nazi plane from taking off. Today, he woke up in New York City nearly 70 years in the future. He had no time to stop and think about what was going on, between the sight of an alien New York lit up brighter than he could ever have imagined, being debriefed by a strange organization that claimed to be on his side, and being given a whole host of materials to catch him up to speed with the rest of the world. It was all he could do just to absorb the information being thrown at him, never mind process and interrogate it.

He feels like he’s floating in a dream. This city is supposed to be New York, and he supposes that he can somewhat tell that it is, in the way the streets intersect, but it feels wholly foreign. There’s technology everywhere he’s never seen in his life. Not a single person he recognizes or knows. And he’s alone.

That’s when it sets in. Only now, in the quiet emptiness of this cavernous apartment, can he begin to think about his final few moments before dying. The sensation of falling too fast to take a breath while he watches the plane, and by extension, Bucky, explode into nothingness. He let Bucky die, and he feels his chest cave in.

He let a child die for him. He knows that Bucky wasn’t a child by then, and that Steve was only four years older than him anyway—they were both kids, really. And Cap and Bucky had been partners, equally skilled. But Steve had never been able to help feeling that Bucky was like a little brother. He didn’t _have_ to watch out for him, Bucky could take care of himself just fine. But he _wanted_ to.

And then he still jumped off the plane while Bucky was stuck to it, and let him face death all alone.

For the first time in god knows how long, Steve hunches over and weeps. 

* * *

He dives into the research materials he’s been given. Fury and SHIELD had been nice enough to give him some basic history texts and a primer on modern culture and technology. The books are a good enough place to start, he reasons. If he wants to know more, he’ll find more.

He starts with World War 2, of course. It had been his primary focus for the past five years, of course he wanted to know more about it as soon as possible. Fury had already told him that the Allies had won, thankfully, but not much else. Or maybe he had and Steve hadn’t absorbed it.

So when he cracks open a history book and finds out that the war had ended in Europe in May 1945, followed by the rest of the war in September, he begins to laugh. Well isn’t that funny? Just a few weeks after he and Bucky died, the war finally ended! If they’d just held out a little while longer, they could’ve lived to see the end of the war!

Except Steve has, hasn’t he? It’s just Bucky who hasn’t. Bucky, who’d spent a huge chunk of his life training for and living the war, who’d practically been defined by it. If anyone deserved to live to see the end of it, it was him. And yet, he didn’t. Because he died a scant few weeks earlier, left behind by a country and a world all too happy to celebrate without him.

Steve Rogers thinks this might actually just be a very creative corner of hell.

* * *

A week later, Fury calls him back into SHIELD to introduce him to a Commander Brooks. Brooks is here to issue him orders. A relief aid mission of some sort for hurricane victims in Florida. He runs Steve through an explanation of what happened, where he’s going, how many victims there are, and how they’re going to run this relief mission.

Steve nods along and agrees, for formality’s sake. He knows he doesn’t really have a choice here. That apartment full of groceries and clothes and history books doesn’t come free, after all. Steve knows when it’s his time to pay up. He just doesn’t understand why they’d assign the world’s only super soldier and man out of time to a relief mission. 

He’s given a day to prepare for it, but he elects to go that night. After all, it’s not like he has much to do in the way of preparations. He has no one to say goodbye to and barely owns more than the clothes on his back. So he spends the rest of the day getting set up with his new squad within SHIELD under Brooks. He’s given a SHIELD uniform that declares him to be Corporal Rogers, which he can’t help but grin at. He doesn’t know if the rank hierarchy at SHIELD is the same as the army’s (or, hell, if the Army even has the same ranks he remembers), but he can’t help but wonder if someone here knows that, out of the tights, he’d been a corporal in the war too.

Steve departs on a plane that night, anonymous among dozens of other members of his squad. As Corporal Rogers, he is no more remarkable than any of the rest of them, and they barely pay him any attention at all.

The next day, he’s put to work. Brooks’s orders to him are simple: take the box he’s handed, and pass it along to the next person in the line. They’ve formed a human chain of dozens to transport boxes of supplies from a helicopter drop into a warehouse. It takes them the better part of the day to unload everything, but when they finish there’s still more work to do. Steve is put on the first shift to guard the warehouse.

It’s only then, when Steve has nothing to do but stand around and think, that some of this begins to strike him as strange. Why did they drop the supplies by a remote warehouse? Looking outside, he’s pretty sure the road is blocked by fallen trees and branches—this place isn’t going to be accessible to the hurricane victims who need these supplies. And, he notices the following day on his next guard shift, the men patrolling the warehouse’s perimeter outside are armed. It seems unnecessary.

Once his shift ends, he tracks down Brooks to ask about it. Brooks gives him a long, scrutinizing look before eventually grunting.

“This was just phase one. We’ll be distributing the supplies to people soon. We’re guarding the warehouse from looters until then.”

Steve’s brow furrows. “Sir, shouldn’t we distribute them as soon as possible? What’s the point in waiting, especially when it means we’re sitting ducks for whoever we’re guarding against?”

Brooks glares at him sharply. “I know who you are, Rogers. You’re used to calling the shots. But don’t think that you know all the details and variables at play here. This is all bigger than just what you can see.”

Steve’s lips press into a thin line. Brooks holds his gaze a few seconds longer, then waves his hand at him. “Get out of my sight, Rogers. We’re done here.”

Steve stares him down a few moments. Neither of them breathe or blink. Then, he turns around and leaves. He doesn’t ask any more questions for the duration of the mission, he knows he won’t get answers. By the time he boards the plane to return to New York, the supplies have still not left the warehouse.

After returning home, he is not assigned to any further missions. He hears nothing from Brooks, or anyone else for that matter. After a full day of dead silence, Steve is determined to understand what exactly he’s meant to do now. He makes his way to Fury’s office, because it’s the only one he knows how to find and he is the closest thing Steve has so far to a friendly face here.

Which is pretty dire, he thinks with the slightest grin to himself.

He finds Fury’s office door shut, so he knocks on it a few times and announces himself.

“Director Fury, sir? This is Corporal Rogers.”

The sound of shuffling papers and possibly a groan, followed by silence. Then, a gruff “alright, alright, come in.”

Steve steps into the office and shuts the door behind him. Standing tall with his arms folded behind him, he approaches Fury at his desk.

“Sir, I’m here to express some concerns about the relief mission I was sent on a few days ago. It seems...tactically inefficient.” He explains his concerns to Fury, who doesn’t budge from his slumped, arm-crossed seat.

“Rogers, why are you wasting my time with this? Take this to Brooks.” Fury waves his hand dismissively. 

“I already have. He says I don’t have all the context.”

“Which you _don’t_.”

Steve can’t help but bristle at that.

“Just because I don’t know the big picture doesn’t mean I can’t identify inefficiency when it’s right in front of me. Sir.” He squares his shoulders like the leader he is. “We should be air dropping pallets of supplies directly into disaster zones so that we can distribute goods to those in need in the quickest possible fashion. If we divide up the goods through the area and send a few men to each, we could get aid to people far quicker than we are right now.”

Fury groans, long-suffering.

“Cap, national icon or not, you are here by _my_ good graces. I didn’t _have_ to find you a place to live and get you all the support you’re getting, but I figure any man who’s socked Hitler in the jaw deserves a reward. Now, that said, I’m still a mere mortal and I don’t need any more headaches than I’ve already got, so if you’re not going to do your job, you’re more than welcome to find a new one.”

Steve’s lips thin out as he squares his shoulders. He’s clearly not going to find any sympathy here, nor is he going to receive an explanation. Something roils in his chest. He isn’t owed an explanation, certainly, but it doesn’t bode well that no matter how logically he explains his concerns and offers better alternatives, he isn’t given a shred of information. It’s a single mission where everything went just as planned—but something about this leaves a bad taste in his mouth and bodes poorly.

Not to mention, his reputation precedes him here in a way that only ever seems to serve as a way for his superiors to put him in his place. Perhaps it’s that last bit, that final indignity that forces him to speak rashly.

“Then maybe I will.”

And with that, he strides out of the office.

* * *

“It seems Captain America isn’t cooperating with orders as nicely as we’d like. He’s asking a lot of unnecessary questions.”

“I see. I have an idea that might make him a bit more...strategically helpful.”

* * *

After that discussion, Steve leaves to continue stewing alone in the vast expanse of his new apartment. He receives no further orders, nor does he send anything indicating his resignation. If Fury took his parting words seriously, he has no idea, and for the time being, he can’t bring himself to care. He returns to his new hobbies of reading up on what he’d missed in the past 70 years and mourning Bucky. 

He thinks about all the ways he could have saved Bucky. He could have ripped Bucky off the rocket and taken him with him. He could have braked the motorcycle instead of jumping it onto the rocket. He could have broken free of his restraints and beaten Zemo senseless before he tortured Bucky and made him scream before Steve’s eyes. He could have spotted the agents that ambushed them on their last mission, prevented their capture at Zemo’s hands in the first place. 

Except he couldn’t. He’d had no way of knowing what would come, what would happen. He’d done the best he could with what he had at the time, and so had Bucky. And yet, he can’t help but grasp at straws in his memories, desperately rifling through _what if_ after _what if_ , as if he’d had any choice in the matter.

Steve doesn’t know what’s worse: the thought that he could have saved Bucky and didn’t, or that he was always powerless to save him in the first place.

Occasionally he even guilts himself into going outside and exploring a very different New York. It’s after one of these disorienting neighborhood walks (this time through Greenwich Village—he’s still working up the nerve to go back to the Lower East Side) that he gets a message on his phone. Steve fumbles the phone out of the pocket, still unfamiliar with it. So far he’s been able to gather that it’s interactive and activated by his fingertip and can instantly send and deliver telegrams. By the sheer amount of stuff he sees on the screen, he can tell there’s a lot more, but he doesn’t want to dive into the further complexities of it just yet. 

He finally gets the message open to see it’s from Fury. He furrows his brow—this is the first time Fury’s said anything to him in a week. The message is curt, but not as curt as he’d expect from a telegram. Maybe that’s just the kind of man Fury is.

_You’re getting a new roommate. Not enough apartments available on short notice so we had to double you up. Furniture’s already all set up for him._

Steve furrows his brow at the message. He’s not sure what to make of it. That’s all the explanation he gets? He couldn’t have at least been called in and been told this directly with more details on the sudden change and who his new roommate is? This is all a little too haphazard and messy from an organization as secretive and classified as SHIELD, especially considering the swift officiality of his own apartment assignment.

Steve barely has time to check out the new furniture arrangements—his bed’s been pushed to the side of the bedroom to make way for a second bed—before there’s a knock at the door. That must be the new roommate, he supposes. He opens the door and is struck dumb.

Because it’s Bucky. Bucky, who two weeks earlier had died and then been left to gather dust in history for 60 years. Bucky, who he’d locked himself up in his apartment and grieved over for two weeks.

A dreamlike state, similar to what his first day in the future felt like, takes over him.

“Hey, Steve. Fancy seeing you here, huh?” Bucky shifts his grip on his duffel bag and gives him a grin that’s equal parts wry and nervous.

“B-Bucky!” He stammers, suddenly unable to form words. “Y-you’re—”

“Aw come on, it’s not that surprising!” Bucky laughs, just as boisterous and cocky as he remembers. “If you can survive falling off a plane, why wouldn’t I too? Now are you gonna let me in, or what?”

Steve can’t even begin to string words together right now, so he dumbly steps aside to let Bucky into the apartment. As he steps in, he looks around and whistles, impressed. 

“Wow, they really set you up here, huh? No wonder they couldn’t give me my own place—your apartment’s too big for them to fit any others in here!”

“When did you—how—what—”

Bucky unceremoniously dumps the duffel bag in the middle of the living room and crosses his arms with a smirk.

“You got a question in there somewhere?” It’s obviously rhetorical though, because he doesn’t even wait for Steve to ask a question before continuing. “When they found you in the ocean, they figured I must’ve been in the same area. They told me they were expecting to just find a body they could finally bury, but apparently we were both frozen like fossils in the middle of the ocean. I only just finished defrosting yesterday and got the all-clear from medical a few hours ago.”

“And now you’re here,” says Steve, his voice unexpectedly weak.

“And you’re damn lucky I am! You know you’re useless without me, Cap.” 

Somehow, that’s what finally pulls Steve out of the haze. It’s only been a few weeks, but he feels like he somehow forgot this—the camaraderie, the bravado, the way Bucky acts like he’s the one who keeps Steve out of trouble. The return of the familiar dynamic feels like it’s simultaneously squeezing his heart in his chest as well as releasing it from a tension he hadn’t known had built up.

He laughs wetly and blinks away the tears before grabbing Bucky’s duffel bag. 

“Let’s get you moved in, then, huh?”

It doesn’t take long to get him settled. Like Steve himself, Bucky has little more than a few outfits and a phone to his name—all provided by SHIELD, of course. It’s quick and easy to get his things squared away in the new dresser that was brought in earlier that day. The bedroom now has two beds and they find some spare linens in a closet to make the new bed with.

It’s haphazard, but they can’t complain. After all, they usually slept in far worse conditions during the war. Sharing a bedroom is nothing, especially one as spacious as this.

Steve can’t help but furtively steal glances at Bucky throughout the day, afraid he’ll vanish into thin air the second he looks away. It feels too good, too perfect to be true. After spending weeks playing Bucky’s death over and over in his head, coming to terms with the loss, grappling with his role in it, he feels almost...unworthy. How could he deserve this when he’d let go of that rocket and left Bucky helpless in his final moments? After failing Bucky so thoroughly, this is a happy ending he hasn’t earned.

Steve Rogers knows the universe is unfair. But just this once, he selfishly, gratefully accepts it.

* * *

A few days after Bucky moves in, Steve finally gets new orders. Or so he assumes, at least—a vague text from Fury tells him to come to his office at 1300. And yeah, sure, the last time he met with Fury, he threatened to quit altogether. But he’s had time to cool down since then, and he’s willing to give this another shot. Even if his COs maintain a condescending attitude towards him, he can still help and he can still push for more transparent information. After all, what is Captain America if not stubborn? 

And, perhaps more selfishly, he feels he owes it as a personal favor to SHIELD now. Not just for the apartment and the money and the support in adjusting to a new life, but for going the extra mile to search for Bucky and bring him back too. After reuniting with the partner he was sure was dead (the partner he was sure he’d left to die alone), giving SHIELD the benefit of the doubt feels like the least he can do. 

Steve packs the SHIELD uniform he received for his last mission into a bag and prepares to head out. As he steps out into the living room on his way to the front door, though, he spots Bucky on the couch, feet propped up and reading a book and definitely not preparing for a mission of any kind.

“Are you…” He stops and rephrases his thoughts. “Do you work for SHIELD now too?” He’d just assumed that, since both he and Bucky had been fished out of the ocean and revived by the same people, they’d both be drafted by their saviors. Especially since they were one of the most famous duos, not just in their own time but throughout history, apparently. In the excitement of finding out his partner was alive, Steve had forgotten to ask.

Bucky cranes his head to look over at Steve and his bag.

“Oh. Yeah, I do, but I’m not front line anymore. I’m working on the administrative side of things now.” He grins smugly. “I figure I’ve earned the right to try my hand at some desk work. So I may not be working with you directly anymore, but I know all about the operations you get sent on.” The grin turns devious, like sitting behind a desk with intel suddenly means Bucky’s a general who can give Steve orders.

Steve rolls his eyes. “Okay, Bucky, have fun with that. I bet you’ll be itching to join me in a week.”

Then he leaves, bag in tow. It’s strange, he thinks, as he leaves the apartment building. He hadn’t even known that desk work was an option.

That mission, as well as the next several, fall into a familiar rhythm. Steve gets a vague text telling him to report for orders (although the texts are sent by Brooks directly now), he gets shipped off to some disaster area or another in the US, he moves relief supplies off a helicopter into a warehouse that he guards, and then he goes home without ever seeing the supplies get distributed. Every time he tries to bring up the ludicrousness of it to his CO, he’s dismissed before he can even start. He tries bringing it up to his fellow squadmates, but they have no patience for him; some huff in annoyance, some tell him to stop giving a shit about things above his pay grade, and some aggressively ignore him.

On his fourth mission, Steve is guarding the warehouse’s main entrance. He’s in the Houston, Texas area helping with relief efforts after a category 5 hurricane decimated the entire region. Their patrols are much stricter this time around since the warehouse is so close to residential areas—more people around means more reason to guard against them, apparently.

He feels like he’s falling asleep on his feet—honestly, how did Bucky do all those stakeouts without falling asleep?—when he spots a few people coming towards him. They’re not in uniform. In fact, it looks like a mother and her teenaged son. Their hair is messy, their clothes are rumpled, and they look absolutely exhausted. Steve would bet anything on them being hurricane victims.

“Oh, thank god—who are you, Coast Guard? Red Cross?” the mother asks. She holds her hands up and soon so does her son, no doubt wary of the rifle Steve is forced to carry with him on guard duty. “Listen, we lost—we lost everything in the storm and we’re just trying to get by. Food, clothes, water—anything! Please, we’ll take anything. The shelters are all packed, they can’t take us, and it’s—it’s been days.” Her voice wobbles, like she’s one step away from crying.

Steve doesn’t even have to think about it.

“Of course, ma’am,” he says, in that Captain America voice that’s meant to sound confident and reassuring. He isn’t Cap right now, but they need that strong tone. “Just stay there and don’t go anywhere. I’ll go grab some things for you and come right back.”

He retreats into the warehouse and makes a beeline for the nearest stack of boxes, trying to look like he isn’t blatantly in the wrong place. He’s just about to open one of them when he hears Brooks barking his name.

“ _Rogers_! What in the goddamn hell do you think you’re doing away from your post?!” Brooks stomps up to him.

“There are two hurricane victims at our doorstep who just need some help. What’s the harm in giving them a few things? The supplies will be getting to the victims eventually anyway.”

“What did I tell you last time, Rogers? This isn’t your job! You follow my orders, and my orders are to _stand guard_ ! I don’t give a rat’s ass who comes up to talk to you and how desperate they are, you stand at your post and keep watch! They’ll get their goddamn supplies just fine so long as you do _what I tell you_ and keep this operation running! You understand me, corporal?” 

Brooks is trying to intimidate him. He’s standing over Steve, getting into his personal space, trying to make him feel like a worm. Steve isn’t having it. He stands his ground and sets his jaw. Brooks isn’t happy to see that his subordinate isn’t cowed.

“I said, _do you understand me, corporal_?”

“Yes, sir,” Steve grits out.

“Good. Now get back to your position before I decide to court martial you.”

Brooks stares him down until he stands up and exits the warehouse. When he returns to his post, he intends to apologize to the mother and son, but they’re gone. He keeps his head down for the rest of the mission, but he can’t stop thinking about them.

* * *

Steve is both distraught and furious when he finally makes his way home in the middle of the night. He slams the door to the apartment a little too loudly and Bucky, who’s awake on the couch and reading at 3 in the morning for some reason, looks up at him and raises an eyebrow.

“Bad day at the office?” he asks.

“The CO’s an asshole,” Steve grumbles, dropping his bag carelessly on the floor. Bucky laughs.

“Yeah, him and every other CO under the sun. Welcome to the party.”

“It’s just—” and then Steve stops himself. 

Bucky rolls his eyes. “You’re not gonna compromise any intel security, if that’s what you’re worried about. Hell, I might have an even higher clearance than you do.”

Well. No excuses left now.

“It’s disaster relief. We’re always doing disaster relief. Getting supplies, distributing them to the area, all that stuff. But I’ve never seen anything actually going to anyone! We just unload the pallets, guard them, and leave. Even if there’s people right there we could be helping!” Steve doesn’t know when he began waving his arms around, but he’s clearly more worked up about this than he thought. “There were a couple people standing right in front of me, desperate for _anything_ , and I got threatened with a _court martial_ for trying to help them.”

Bucky purses his lips and sets down his book. Silence, then, he sighs.

“You know that just because you’re not there doing things doesn’t mean they aren’t happening, right? You don’t have to do _everything_.” 

Steve furrows his brow. “What?”

“Even if you don’t see the supplies going to people, they still are. You don’t have to see people getting their lives saved to know that they are.”

“And what about those people who came to me begging for help? They were close enough to help and nobody did. What good reason could there possibly be for that?”

Quiet, then Bucky sighs again. “I’m not saying it was right. You _should’ve_ been able to help them. But think about it—could you do more good staying where you are, or getting kicked out on the streets after a court martial? Sometimes, Steve, you have to play the long game.”

Steve is silent as he thinks that over. He’d expected Bucky to commiserate with him, not...this. But, he thinks, maybe it makes sense. Bucky had always been the covert operative between them and much of the work he did was kept secret even from Steve. In fact, it was so secret that Steve forgot about it entirely most of the time. Remembering it now, he supposes that this sort of pragmatic approach makes sense from someone like Bucky. He’s telling him that he can’t use Captain America’s bombastic, symbolic tactics here; Corporal Rogers requires a stealthier approach.

A hand claps on his shoulder and Steve looks up. He hadn’t noticed when Bucky stood up and approached him.

“Come on, pal. Let’s get you into bed before you get any crankier.”

Steve huffs an exhausted laugh and lets Bucky steer him towards the bedroom.

* * *

The soldier wakes the next morning at around 9. He’s not usually one to sleep in, but this is what he gets for staying up until 3 waiting for Rogers. He wouldn’t have bothered, but they sent him Rogers’s return flight information, which they wouldn’t have done unless they specifically wanted the soldier to greet Rogers upon his return. It became apparent why when he saw the look on Rogers’s face. 

Not that he knew what to do with it when confronted by it. He’s running this op on a couple history books and some old newsreel footage; figuring out what to say and how to say it in a way that won’t rouse suspicion is impossible. The soldier has shot diplomats in the middle of speeches, but it’s talking to Steve Rogers like he knows what he’s doing that makes him nervous.

With a sigh, he gets up and quietly gets dressed so as not to wake Rogers, then heads into the SHIELD offices for work. Technically, he’s always working, so it’s not like it matters when (or even if) he actually shows up physically as long as the job gets done, but it’s good to keep up appearances.

Plus, it’s always easier to get answers to his questions in person.

When he enters the office, he greets the receptionist, making sure they see him, then badges into the interior of the building. His walk is more winding than he’d like, but such minor nuisances are just a part of the job. Throwing people off. Misdirection. A few extra minutes walking is a small price to pay for security and stealth, but damn if it isn’t annoying. Like a papercut he can’t ignore.

When he finally makes it to Pierce’s door, he knocks in his designated pattern.

“Permission to enter?”

Some shuffling of papers and chairs being moved, then: “Ah, yes, of course.”

As the soldier steps into the room and shuts the door behind him, Pierce grins and says, “There he is, my man of the hour!”

The soldier doesn’t react, instead standing at attention once he reaches Pierce’s desk. He’s always wary of the man’s false enthusiasm for him. It makes it harder to tell what he’s actually thinking, where he actually stands with him. 

“So, it’s been a while since your new assignment. How are things?” Pierce leans back in his seat, chin propped in his hand.

“How do _you_ think?” He phrases it lightly, a genuine question. The soldier noticed at least five bugs hidden around the apartment. Pierce, or at least a team of analysts with the time to pore over hours of recordings, has clearly been listening in.

“Hmm.” Pierce’s smile drops, just a little. “I think you’re doing excellently thus far. You handled last night expertly, as expected of the Winter Soldier. But I asked because I want to know how _you_ feel about it.”

Obviously, Pierce can tell this isn’t a social visit. Might as well dive into what he came here for.

“Why am I assigned to this mission?” 

“Why wouldn’t you be?” Again with the non-answers.

“I’m designed for quick infiltration and exfiltration and wetwork. You have plenty of agents who are far better at long-term undercover work. So why me?” The soldier pauses, then adds: “Sir.”

Pierce has his fingers over his mouth thoughtfully. He motions to the chair across the desk and the soldier takes a seat. “You sell yourself short, soldier. You may not think it, but you truly are the best man for the job. It’s not about how much training you have, it’s _you_. No one could keep better tabs on Steve Rogers than you.”

It doesn’t answer his question, but the soldier nods anyway.

“Now,” Pierce says, standing from his chair. The soldier takes that as his cue to stand too. Pierce takes his hand and grasps it in what looks like a grateful handshake. “Go out there and make us proud.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title comes from ["Disgustipated" by Tool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmJYZ1NIn1Y). Chapter title comes from ["Chasing It Down" by Mother Mother](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B-D2qXm0cw). 
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com).


	2. The Dirt, The Dark, The Art of War

There are aliens. Attacking New York.

Well, alright, then. 

Steve doesn’t recall ever fighting aliens before, but he supposes he can’t be too surprised. He’s fought Atlanteans before, why not aliens?

He’s called into action directly by Fury himself, not Brooks. Turns out Fury’s cooked up something new, and he wants not just Steve for the job, but Captain America. He’s put together a whole team of people for this—Iron Man, some inventor in a robotic suit he’s vaguely heard of; Thor, the literal god of thunder (sure, why not); Hawkeye, an exceptional archer; Black Widow, a skilled...well, really, he’s not quite sure what it is she does, but he knows she’s skilled at it or she wouldn’t be here; and Bruce Banner, a mild-mannered doctor whose presence here Steve doesn’t fully understand. It vaguely reminds him of the Invaders, he thinks, with a pang in his heart. No time for reminiscing right now.

They’re briefed on the situation and then they’re off. It really does feel just like the old days, jumping into action with whatever hasty intel they can scrounge up. He’s even in a new Captain America suit, which he hadn’t realized he’d missed so much until now.

Somehow, like always, the time blurs by while also passing agonizingly slowly, as he leaps and punches and feels the crack of alien bones under his fists. Every fight lasts an eternity, his nerves on edge as he forces hyperawareness of the enemy’s every move, lest he get hurt (or worse). But whenever he gets a second to breathe between the waves of aliens, it feels as though time hasn’t passed at all.

It’s during one of these breather moments that it happens. One of them sneaks up on him. A shot rings out and for a moment, he fears it’s him or one of his teammates who’s been hit. But no—Steve turns around and sees an alien mere feet from him, gurgling as what he assumes is its blood trickles down its chest. He has no idea where the shot came from—Black Widow’s the only one with guns, and he can see her down the block, busy with her own fight.

Then he gets grabbed. While he was puzzling out who made the shot, another alien must’ve snuck up on him. They have him in a chokehold and he scrambles to get purchase on their arms enough to loosen their grip, but damn, the guy’s slippery. 

He hears—something—a shout?—and feels another hand on his shoulder, and then the alien is violently wrenched off of him. Someone in all black combat gear and a domino mask grabs the alien by the throat with a shiny arm (metal?) and slams them down to the ground so hard the asphalt cracks beneath them. Liquid pools out from underneath them and they go still.

Steve checks around them quickly to make sure there aren’t any more aliens about to get the drop on them, and then turns to his mysterious savior.

“Thanks for the save—”

“Don’t.” His voice is rough and he keeps his head bowed, messy hair covering his face. Before Steve can say or do anything else, he runs off and vanishes almost instantaneously.

He can’t see it, but Black Widow watches the whole encounter from a block away, her lips pursing tightly.

When the fighting is all done and they’re eating shawarma in a destroyed little cafe, Steve eventually breaks the silence.

“Who was that guy earlier? Brown hair, wearing all black, metal arm? Fury didn’t mention him.”

“Uh, who?” asks Iron Man eloquently.

“He showed up, took out a couple aliens that had me on the ropes, then ran off. Didn’t say anything and left as quick as he came.” Steve furrows his brow. “I assumed he was also part of Fury’s team.”

Everyone exchanges glances around the table, searching one another for any scrap of info they might have on the mysterious man. Eventually, they shrug.

“You sure you didn’t just get confused, Cap? Maybe a good hit to the head?” Iron Man says.

Steve opens his mouth to reply, but then notices that Black Widow has gone strangely still and silent. He raises an eyebrow at her, but she doesn’t elaborate.

* * *

The soldier returns to the apartment exhausted. Fucking  _ aliens. _ Like he didn’t have enough shit to deal with right now. Just taking out as many aliens as he could was easy enough but then he caught sight of Rogers getting his ass kicked. He’s under strict orders to never engage with Rogers when he’s doing active Winter Soldier work, but there he was, jumping into the fray to defend him before he could even think. Like an idiot.

_ “Why did you intervene? We sent you in to do crowd control, not make contact with Rogers. Do you even realize the sort of risk you took?” _

_ The words are spoken calmly and softly, but he knows they’re anything but. The soldier pauses and licks his lips. He has to answer very, very carefully. _

_ “It was less of a risk than Rogers potentially dying.” _

_ Silence. Then: _

_ “You’re very lucky he didn’t recognize you.” _

He’s  _ actually _ very lucky that Pierce decided that this mistake was not worth another reset. The soldier appreciates that they’re necessary, especially when he’s just coming out of the ice, but he still hates it. He hates feeling confused and scrambled for days on end. He hates not being able to remember what happened when, the flow of time tangling into a hopeless knot in his head. He hates that it renders him useless until the fogginess in his head clears. He hates that he loses all sense of himself for days on end. But most of all, he hates that it’s necessary to begin with.

But not today, thankfully. The soldier just hopes this pattern holds.

When he makes his way to the apartment, he stands at the door for a few moments, mentally preparing himself. He is James Barnes, but he goes by Bucky. He was Captain America’s partner during World War 2. He’s brash and cocky, quick to anger but with a good sense of humor. Right. Right.

He enters the apartment and groans loudly, collapsing on the couch in an exhausted heap. He throws his arm over his eyes and, just for good measure, groans again.

It seems to work, because Rogers is chuckling tiredly from the other end of the couch.

“That bad, huh?”

“You have  _ no  _ idea. Do you know how much paperwork an alien invasion generates? Because I sure didn’t!”

Another laugh. “Worse than having to fight an alien invasion yourself?”

“Oh, way worse. Fighting aliens is  _ nothing _ —try filling out five different incident reports.  _ Per alien. _ ”

“Well damn. Ya got me there, Buck.” Then, with a tired grin, “Worse than slaying vampires in Belgium?”

Slaying vampires? Is this a facetious joke, or is Rogers referring to an actual case of slaying vampires in Belgium? He wracks his brain for memory of any mentions of vampires in the history books and biographies he read in preparation for this mission. Nothing is coming to mind—whatever Rogers is talking about, it isn’t public knowledge, which means he has to tread carefully. If he treats it like an obvious joke when it’s real, it might raise suspicion. If he treats it like it’s real when it’s a joke, it might be seen as his own sense of humor, or at worst, treated as odd. Treating it as real it is, then. 

From context, he can guess that this incident in Belgium was difficult. Physically for sure, but judging by the look on Rogers’s face, it had an emotional toll as well. So responding too humorously isn’t an option here. Nor is anything too specific, lest this conversation dive into the details of a mission he has no knowledge of. He has to come up with something serious, that shows he remembers the incident in question but phrased vaguely enough to shut down more conversation about it.

Finally, he settles on, “Come on, Steve, you  _ know _ that’s apples to oranges.”

Rogers sighs. “Yeah, I know. Just hard to believe that we worked so much to end all that craziness in the war, only for it to come up again 70 years in the future.”

_ A good sense of humor _ , he reminds himself. “If you thought that crazy attacks would’ve stopped with World War 2, then you’re dumber than I thought.”

Rogers chuckles darkly. “ ‘War never changes,’ huh? But a guy can hope.”

A strange hope, the soldier thinks, for a man whose body and career are built on a foundation of war.

Rogers gets up with the kind of groan that one only makes when every muscle aches. “Alright, I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to eat something. Anything you want, Bucky?”

Rogers moves to pat the soldier on his shoulder—his  _ left shoulder _ —as he passes by him on the couch. The soldier jerks forward and out of reach of Rogers’s arm in what he hopes just looks like him deciding to get up off the couch too, and not him panicking. The silicone cover on his arm looks real enough (so long as he always wears a shirt to cover the seam where the silicone meets flesh), but it does nothing to hide the cold firmness of the metal underneath. Making sure Rogers never touches the left arm is absolutely necessary to keep this op running.

The soldier gets up and stretches his arms upwards before waving his hand dismissively towards the kitchen.

“Anything’s fine, so long as it’s edible,” he says. Then he adds for flavor, “If I never have to eat another c-rat in my life again, it’ll be too soon.”

A strange look passes over Rogers’s face, one that he can’t parse out, before he says, “Okay. I’m sure we’ll be able to scrounge something up from this fully stocked fridge and pantry.”

* * *

The soldier is preparing to head in to ‘work’ when Rogers suddenly pipes up.

“Oh, Brooks just called me in, actually. We could head over together.”

He has no justifiable reason to decline, so he agrees. As they make their way through the city to SHIELD’s offices, Rogers is chatting and the soldier responds wherever appropriate. If Rogers notices that he’s single handedly driving this conversation, he doesn’t show it.

It’s just as they badge in past security and the soldier is separating himself to head to the ‘administrative offices’ that he spots a flash of red and he hesitates.

“Oh, Black Widow! You’re here too?” Rogers says amicably as he approaches her. 

“I’m a SHIELD employee too, you know. Why wouldn’t I be at my workplace?” she says. The soldier has his back to her, halfway to the elevators as he is, but he can hear that familiar playful tone in her voice.

“Buck, come on over!”

Well. This is unexpected. The soldier exhales as calmly as he can and walks over to Rogers, who’s beckoning him, giving Natasha a once-over like he doesn’t recognize her.

“This is Black Widow. She was on that team I told you about that Fury put together to help against the aliens. Black Widow, this is Bucky, my partner from the war. Turns out, he was frozen for years just like I was and came out of it shortly after I did.” Rogers is grinning at them both. Natasha is staring him dead in the eye and he just  _ knows  _ that she recognizes exactly who he is and knows he isn’t Bucky Barnes. 

This op just got even more difficult. Natasha isn’t interested in letting up on her little staring contest. Rogers looks between them both, his smile slowly fading from real to plastic.

“So uh...what about you, Bucky? What were you doing during that whole alien invasion?”

The soldier breaks his eyes off Natasha. Rogers expects an answer. Right.

“Oh. I was working here, helping manage communications, cataloging and finding information on the aliens, keeping track of how many field agents there were...you know. The boring stuff that’s somehow still necessary to keep everything running.” He puts on a slight smirk, as if poking fun at himself, challenging Natasha. She raises a single eyebrow at him.

“Really? I thought the legendary Bucky  _ was  _ a field agent. From what the history books say, you saw just as much action as he did, if not more. Why the shift to admin work?”

The soldier shrugs nonchalantly. “Wanted to try something different. Punching baddies in the face gets old after a couple hundred of ‘em, you know?”

“And how’s paperwork treating you instead? Not getting old yet?”

“Not yet,” he says, because he doesn’t know what Bucky would actually say.

After what feels like another eternity, Natasha drops the sharp watchful eye and shifts into a friendlier, more casual expression.

“Well, it was very nice to meet you, Bucky Barnes. It’s good to know Steve has at least one friend,” Natasha says with a wry smile and a side glance to Steve. She offers up her left hand for a handshake.

The soldier spots it and plasters on an equally wry smile. He puts his hand in hers and shakes, letting her feel the firm metal under his silicone arm cover. With a bit of a squeeze, she brings up her second hand to clasp over his as well, a truly tight grasp, and he casually slides the note she slips him into his palm, keeping it out of sight as they break the handshake off.

Later, when the soldier has made his way to the administrative floor and gotten some space, he glances at the slip of paper. An address along with a date and time. Fair enough.

* * *

When Steve next returns to the apartment, it’s four days later and he’s once again frustrated with the work Brooks keeps putting him on. He’s trying to take Bucky’s advice to heart about ‘playing the long game,’ but he’s not one for subterfuge. He prefers to handle things as directly and quickly as possible. The faster a problem is resolved, the fewer people get hurt.

Unfortunately, Bucky isn’t home this time when he returns. It gives him pause for a moment. He’d gotten used to Bucky lounging on the couch when he enters the apartment, ready to lend Steve an ear. But Steve quickly waves the feeling off. Bucky has his own life and his own work. He’s likely still doing whatever it is he does at SHIELD’s offices.

Steve spends his alone time in the apartment cooling off from his frustration with Brooks. He puts away his things and tidies up around the apartment—not that there’s much to tidy, considering the both of them had neatness drilled into them by the army. But it’s a nice diversion, at least.

Mostly he wipes down some tabletops and puts away Bucky’s books. It’s strange, he’d never considered Bucky much of a heavy reader before. He was always more social, preferring to pal around with Toro and get involved in all sorts of chaos. But, Steve thinks, it’s not like they have many friends these days, so maybe the new reading habit is how he’s dealing with it.

Maybe he should look up all those old friends, see where they are now.

Maybe he shouldn’t.

He glances over the books as he picks them up and shelves them. Some of them are the same history books Fury had given Steve upon his initial wakening. Looks like Bucky’s interested in catching up on the world too. A lot more interested than Steve is, it seems, given the wear and tear the book’s seen since he last read it. And then some other books Bucky must’ve picked up on his own:  _ Captain America: The Life and Legacy of Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes: Separating Fact From Fiction, The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won  _ and  _ The United States and World War II. _

The latter two books give him pause and he flips through them. It’s strange to him that Bucky is so interested in learning more about not just the years after the war, but the war itself. Bucky had lived it himself, he didn’t need to read books about it when he had plenty of memories of it. But then again, there’s a bigger picture to the war than either of them had ever known. Maybe Bucky’s interested in the parts he wasn’t involved in.

By the time it’s starting to get dark, Bucky returns to the apartment.

“Oh hey, you’re back!” Steve calls out over his shoulder. “I was just cleaning up. I shelved all your books for you.”

Bucky freezes momentarily, glancing over at the bookshelf Steve is pointing to, then walks further into the living room. 

“Huh. Thanks.” Then, slowly, Bucky crosses his arms across his chest, faint hint of a smirk on his lips. “But what’s got you tidying up my books for me?”

Damn, busted. Steve laughs helplessly.

“Just another mission from Brooks. It’s still the same old routine, but as if that’s not bad enough, they’re still sending me out all over the place. This time it was wildfire relief in California. Meanwhile, just look what we’ve got here!” Steve throws his arm out in the direction of the window. While their apartment building may have survived the invasion unscathed, large swathes of Manhattan were utterly destroyed, reduced to rubble. “They’re ignoring the problem right under our noses! What are we doing, shipping men out across the country when we could be doing more right  _ here _ ?” 

Steve pauses to take a breath and calm down.

“ _ Are _ we?” he asks. “Doing more right here?”

Bucky looks at him a moment, then, shrugging: “Not my division, but yeah. I know there’s a whole lot of…” he waves his hand around vaguely, “funnelling money to charities and drafting up construction permits and all that.”

Steve sighs, as if defeated.

“How do you  _ do  _ this, Buck? The whole...staying put and following orders when you know you could be doing so much more out there?”

Bucky laughs. “You’re asking me that  _ now _ ? Five years of wartime combat didn’t teach you the answer?” Steve rolls his eyes at him and drops the subject, but there must be something in the hunch of his shoulders that Bucky notices, because he continues, “It’s the same thing everywhere, Steve. There’s always someone that needs help, a fight that needs to be fought. We couldn’t do it all then, we can’t do it all now.”

Steve sighs.

“When’d you get so damn wise, Bucky?” He laughs. “Namor’d give us both hell if he knew you were the one giving me advice now.” 

Bucky doesn’t reply. Steve assumes he’s pensive. He isn’t the type, normally, but, well...waking up 70 years in the future knowing all your friends and loved ones are either dead or dying might lead you to be a bit more contemplative than normal. Steve certainly knows that’s been the case for him.

Steve sighs. “Do you think he’s still around?” He has no idea what Atlantean life spans are like.

Bucky shrugs wordlessly.

“If you could meet all the other Invaders again...would you?”

Bucky is silent. Steve turns to look at him. He was looking off into the distance, but with Steve now focused on him, he returns the gaze, looking somehow helpless.

“I don’t know,” he eventually says, voice unusually soft. “It’d be...weird, wouldn’t it? All these old friends, and they’re old men while we’re the same...they might be totally different people now. Unrecognizable.” He squares his shoulders. “It might not be like seeing old friends at all.”

Steve sighs. Well, that’s certainly a depressing take on it.

“It might,” he says. “Or it might be great. Catching up with old friends, people we’ve been through hell with, or...at least getting some closure.” Whether it’s closure for them or their friends or both, he’s not sure.

Bucky hums. “It might.” But he doesn’t sound convinced.

* * *

There’s a knock at the apartment’s door, and Steve is startled. The only people who ever came here were Bucky and himself, both of whom had keys and had no reason to knock and ask for entry. Right now, it’s just him at home, but Bucky left for work a few hours ago and told Steve not to expect him back until late, possibly tomorrow.

(Steve does not understand what kind of admin job requires such a haphazard schedule and unpredictable overnight calls.)

Steve slowly opens the door, surprised to see the Black Widow on the other side.

“Wh—uh, hi. What are you doing here?” he asks, like a total idiot. “I mean, I never gave you my address.”

“No, you didn’t,” she confirms. “But I think a certain level of closeness can be expected when you fight an alien invasion back to back with someone.”

That still doesn’t answer Steve’s question as to how she found his address, but before he can dwell on that any longer, she crosses the threshold and enters the apartment. Steve dimly shuts the front door behind them.

“Okay,” he says warily. “So is this just a social call, then?” Because he can’t see Black Widow as the type to show up just to socialize. He doesn’t know her particularly well, but she strikes him as the type of person who does everything in service of a specific goal.

“More or less,” she hums as she looks around the apartment. “Can’t blame a girl for wondering what Captain America’s like in his off hours, after all.” She catches sight of the bedroom’s two beds through the open door and throws Steve a look with a raised eyebrow.

Steve sighs. “When Bucky was found, they didn’t have time to find another apartment for him, so they just put us both up in here.” 

“But they had enough time to find an apartment for  _ you _ ,” says Widow, staring at him with intent he can’t parse out. Steve doesn’t know what to say to that, so he shrugs.

Black Widow then glides through the rest of the living room, seemingly scrutinizing every corner. She brushes her fingers along the couch and its armrests as she passes it. She seems to be fascinated by every element of the room—where the furniture meets the wall, the curtains, the corners of the room. Eventually, she settles in front of the bookshelf, books tidily stacked from Steve’s organizing stint yesterday.

“Hmm,” she says, brushing her fingertips along the spines of the books. “Lots of history books here. Especially World War 2.”

Steve leans against the couch, watching her curiously. “Yeah. Most of those are Bucky’s. I think he’s pretty interested in learning about the parts of the war we didn’t personally see.”

“And biographies,” she says, tapping the books on Steve and Bucky themselves.

Steve shrugs again, because he can’t really speak for Bucky and what motivated him to buy those books. “He’s been doing a lot of reading lately.”

“Was he always a big reader?”

“Not really,” Steve says. “But we were fighting a war back then. It didn’t leave much time for hobbies.” Maybe if they’d known each other outside the war, during peacetime, Steve would’ve seen Bucky doing a lot more reading like he is now.

Steve isn’t even sure how much he knows of Bucky’s life and habits before they met, lives already irrevocably changed by the war. He vaguely remembers a general once telling him they let Bucky join him at 16 only because he was going to end up in fights no matter what; they might as well point him in the direction of the bad guys. That doesn’t sound like the type of guy to be a big reader but, well, what does he know. He’s struck with a sudden feeling of helplessness as he realizes that Bucky’s life and habits before the war are almost a complete mystery to him.

Black Widow pulls him out of his reverie with more small talk—how’s he adjusting to life in the future so far (about as well as one can expect, he imagines, it’s not like there’s a metric he can compare himself to), how strange was it to suddenly fight an alien invasion (not very, actually), what was it like to be living in New York again (it’s nice to be home, he says, even though it doesn’t feel like it).

“Hmm, well. If you ever need any help, give me a call,” she says before she leaves. Steve nods, and as he shuts the apartment door behind her, realizes that she never gave him her phone number. 

* * *

Bucky doesn’t come home that night; looks like whatever he’s doing will require him to work overnight after all.

Steve goes to the SHIELD offices the next day intending to organize a few things in his locker, but is cut off by a seething Fury stalking down the hall towards him, barking orders at a couple of lower-ranked soldiers flanking him.

“What’s going on?” asks Steve as Fury passes him.

“Not now, Cap,” he growls, “I have a fucking nuclear war to prevent because of the  _ goddamn  _ Winter Soldier!”

And that’s that. As swiftly as he came, Fury disappears down the hall. Steve is left gaping behind him.

Once Steve finally makes his way home, he turns on the news to see that a high-ranking Latverian diplomat, travelling to a Central European peace summit, was found dead in his hotel room last night. Cause of death is still under investigation, but scuff marks on the wall and furniture in the room appear to indicate a struggle of some kind.

When Bucky returns to the apartment, he greets Steve casually, but he doesn’t miss the way Bucky is limping ever so slightly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The identity porn plot THICKENS.
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["Tiny Gods" by Shayfer James](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irauEWRYbSE).
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com).


	3. Strange Phenomenon

Steve and Bucky are both given time off for the next week after the diplomat’s assassination. Apparently SHIELD is too busy cleaning up an international relations disaster to run aid missions, or...have administrative work that needs to be done, Steve supposes.

Just as well. Even if Bucky’s just a desk jockey, he still deserves some time off, especially with that injury of his.

“Hey Buck,” he asks on day two of their impromptu vacation, “how’d you hurt your leg?”

Bucky stiffens and looks at him with an odd mixture of confusion and alarm. “Uh—what? What makes you think I hurt my leg?”

“You’ve been limping the past few days.” Steve furrows his brow.

Bucky shakes his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Steve. I didn’t get hurt at all. I’m a desk jockey, remember?”

And that’s all he offers before marching off into the kitchen to make a snack. Steve watches him move across the apartment very carefully, and...yes, he definitely is still limping.

Huh. Weird. 

That’s when he hears a strange humming noise from the kitchen. Steve peers over his shoulder from his position on the couch to see what on earth Bucky is doing to make that kind of mechanical sound.

He’s standing by the kitchen counter, watching a box set above the stove. Steve has spent a good amount of time staring at the strange box, trying to figure out what it is or what it’s even supposed to do, but he never bothered actually trying to use it. He knows full well that trying to use machinery cluelessly was a one-way ticket to disaster.

And yet, here’s Bucky, who somehow knows exactly what the device does and how to operate it.

Steve gets up and approaches him, looking at the box. Through the window, he can see the inside is lit up while a bowl rotates inside. Bucky appears to be focused on it, not acknowledging Steve at all until he leans forward to look at him.

“So...what is this thing?” he asks, gesturing at the box. Bucky looks at him now with a strange expression on his face.

“Uh...a microwave?” Bucky phrases it like a question, like it’s obvious. Steve can’t help but feel the slightest bit annoyed; how the hell is he supposed to know that? “It heats food.”

“How is that any different to a stove?”

This actually gives Bucky pause. “I don’t know. I think it...shoots waves at the food and makes the particles in it move faster and that’s why the food gets hotter.” Bucky waves his hand vaguely as he explains. “It’s not like a stove where you’re just putting fire under your food.”

“Sounds very...scientific. How’d you learn about all this?” Because ‘microwaves’ sure as hell weren’t a thing in the 40s. Steve had been brought up to speed on things like cell phones and the internet, but nobody ever mentioned microwaves. 

“Oh. Uh...there’s a lot of them in the break rooms at SHIELD. That’s what everyone uses to heat up their lunches or cold cups of coffee,” Bucky murmurs and sinks into his shoulders as if this is an embarrassing admission. 

The microwave’s light shuts off and it begins beeping. Steve startles. Bucky huffs a quiet laugh as he pops open the door and pulls out the bowl. Steve leans over to try and get a look at what’s in the bowl. He’s not sure what he expects to see; some kind of futuristic technicolor mush?

Bucky raises an eyebrow and tilts the bowl forward to give him a better look. “Mashed potatoes,” he says drily, before grabbing a spoon and taking his hot bowl of leftovers from last night with him to the living room.

* * *

On day four of their nebulous vacation, a combination of stir-craziness and exasperated courage drives Steve out of the house to finally explore his old neighborhood. He drags Bucky along too, both for moral support and to show off the place he called home to his friend.

They take the train to Delancey and Essex and Steve takes the lead in navigating. Bucky is taking it all in, trying not to look lost even though Steve can tell he is. So he leads them down Houston first, skirting the edges of the old neighborhood.

It’s surreal. He was scared to come back here before, and rightfully so, it appears. There’s so little he recognizes. Modern midtown where he now lives is foreign to him but that was okay, it had always been foreign to him. But the Lower East Side? This was where he was born and raised. Until the army, this neighborhood was the only place he’d ever known—and it’s all gone.

Not entirely, though; there’s still the bones of the city he once knew. The occasional apartment building with the familiar stoops and fire escapes. The ways the streets intersect. But there’s little else. It feels...emptier, somehow. The road leading up to East River Drive is, of course, still there, but now it’s called “FDR Drive” and the rows of tightly packed tenements are gone, replaced by a collection of strange three-pronged towers that stretch as far as he can see, surrounded by more greenery than he could ever imagine in this neighborhood. He circles the blocks searching for Goerck Street, where he remembers playing on the street with the local kids while his mom visited her friends in the area, only to realize that it has now been given a new life as the completely unrecognizable Baruch Place.

It makes him feel like an alien. 

Fortunately, there are a few points of similarity still. Steve’s face lights up when they pass by Katz’s Deli.

“I can’t believe this is still here!” Sure, the building looks a little different, and the neon lights are new, but that vertical sign out front is exactly the same as the one he knew as a kid. “Oh, they have the best sandwiches, Buck. I used to come here for birthdays—they always put extra meat in my sandwiches, because they thought I was too skinny, so those things were always as big as my head!” He laughs. “We’d have leftovers for at least another day.”

“Oh yeah? I’m amazed they didn’t go out of business, the way you kept guilting them into giving you free food,” Bucky smirks at him. Steve grins back before focusing on the streets ahead.

“So,” he says, “a couple blocks down this way is where I used to live. Come on.” 

These streets feel a little more familiar, at least. They somehow feel busier and emptier at the same time—fewer people mill about, but it still feels cramped from all the parked cars along the curbs. 

When they get to Steve’s old block, he feels like the wind is knocked out of him. Miraculously, more than half the buildings on this street are ones he vividly remembers. Sure, some of them have been repainted, spruced up here and there, and the storefronts on the ground level are different. Gone are the Hebrew and Yiddish signs, gone are the awnings, replaced by sleek-looking coffee shops, a vegan restaurant, and some trendy clothing boutiques. The building directly across from his has been knocked down and replaced by a parking garage and a hotel.

But everything else? It feels like coming home.

“Look,” he shoulders Bucky and points up at a third-floor window of his building. “That’s where I used to live. We were lucky—we had an apartment with windows facing the street, with the fire escapes. Some apartments didn’t have windows outside at all. Sometimes in summer, I’d sleep out on the fire escape because it’d get too warm inside.”

Bucky is strangely silent, still absorbing the sight of the building. Steve has no idea what he’s thinking. He points to a storefront on the other side of the street.

“That used to be a Yiddish bookstore. But it was one of the few places around with a half-decent yard, so the owners let us into the back to play, so long as we didn’t break anything.” Steve smiles crookedly. “We did, of course—plenty of times. But they still let us keep coming back.”

Steve falls silent, suddenly feeling self-conscious in the wake of Bucky’s total non-reaction. He didn’t know it, but he’d been looking for...some kind of back and forth. A chance to engage and reminisce with him. But now, Bucky seems to be completely uninterested. He doesn’t know what to do with this.

Then, beside him: “Figures. Only you would break things and have enough of a goody-two-shoes boy-scout face to get anyone to forgive you and invite you back in.”

It startles a laugh out of Steve, and suddenly he feels lighthearted. He feels silly now, getting so wound up over a bit of silence from his friend.

Bucky grins at him and says, “So, what, you’re gonna stand around here spending all day talking ancient history, old man?”

Steve huffs another laugh.

“Oh yeah? Well, turnabout’s fair play. What about you, huh?”

Bucky appears to stiffen for a moment, oddly. He seems to stare up into the sky for a minute.

“I was born in Indiana. My sister and I, we lived there with my mom. Dad was in the Army so we didn’t see him a lot. Then our mom got sick and died, so we moved to live with our dad in Virginia, close to Camp Lehigh. Then when our dad died too, Becca got sent to boarding school and I stayed to live in the barracks.” His tone is oddly flat, like he’s reading a passage out of a book. 

But more than that, all of this is completely new to Steve. He’d known that Bucky had a sister in boarding school—how could he not, the way Bucky clutched every letter she’d ever sent him—but he hadn’t known much about his parents other than that his father died. Hell, he hadn’t even known Bucky was from Indiana.

“Huh,” says Steve. “Never woulda pegged you for a corn country boy.”

Bucky grins and shoves him playfully. “What would you know about corn country, city boy? I bet you’ve never even _seen_ a cornfield.”

“I’m a civilized man, I have no need to.”

And so it goes; they walk aimlessly through the neighborhood, softening Steve’s shock and nostalgia in turn with friendly ribbing. But there’s a quiet, nervous voice in the back of Steve’s head whispering:  _ what else don’t I know about him? What else did I miss? _

* * *

The soldier wants nothing more than to get out of this suffocating apartment and stop pretending he’s someone he’s not. He hadn’t realized how draining undercover work like this can be until this week; normally, he gets some time every other day or so where he doesn’t have to pretend to be Bucky Barnes. Once he steps foot into his SHIELD department, or puts on the combat attire, he can just...be. He doesn’t have to remember to respond to strange names, or constantly think about how to act, or carefully keep track of a World War 2 timeline in his head with every word he speaks.

He can just listen, take orders, and appreciate the smooth slide of a knife against flesh.

It’s so much easier.

But now, he’s approaching a full week of nonstop Bucky duty. He wants to burst into Pierce’s office and scream, not that he would even if he had the opportunity. Maybe, though, he wouldn’t have carried out that hit on the Latverian diplomat if he’d known it would result in a week with Rogers that was somehow both mindnumbing and incredibly stressful.

Right now, they’re playing a card game and chatting. Gin rummy, because there’s just the two of them so most other games are out of the question. The soldier would prefer durak, but he couldn’t very well suggest that, now, could he?

“So. You said you lived at Camp Lehigh, right? How long?”

The soldier rifles through his mental timeline. George Barnes had died in a training accident shortly before Christmas in 1937. Bucky had been selected for special training and sent abroad to the SAS in 1940.

“About three or four years.” His hand is a mess right now, so the soldier gets rid of one of his cards and takes a new one from the deck.

Rogers whistles in what he supposes is an impressed tone. “Long time. What’s a kid do on an army base?” Then he, too, gets rid of one of his cards and replaces it with a new one from the deck.

The soldier shrugs, staring at his hand because it’s easier to look at than Rogers. Ah, look, he has a run going with some of his cards. He should try to preserve it. “You could say I had a little business going. Soldiers wanted things, I knew how to get ‘em, and we traded.”

“Did you...go to school?”

The soldier shrugs again, this time painting the tiniest of smirks on his face. In truth, he has no idea if Bucky Barnes attended school after his father died; the history books didn’t seem to mention it either way. Perhaps, after Bucky’s death, there had been no one left alive who knew. A mystery lost to time that no one cared to know or solve. Better to let Rogers come to his own conclusions here. 

Rogers rolls his eyes with a small grin and makes his move. He grabs from the discard pile, this time.

“What was it like, living in Indiana?”

Damn. He really doesn’t want to talk about this. Bucky’s life before Camp Lehigh is the least documented. All his family who’d been there were either dead or too young at the time to remember much, and neighbors liked to spin tall tales about their hometown hero that no one could verify. The soldier knows only the barest of basics of those early years. Why is Rogers getting so reminiscent all of a sudden? 

He rolls his own eyes, exaggerating as much as he can. “Wow, you New Yorkers really  _ do  _ think the rest of the country is another planet, don’t you?”

Rogers laughs—success. “Are you gonna tell me I’m wrong?” 

Question not deflected—not success. The soldier sighs. He’s just going to have to wing it. Damn, he doesn’t know the first damn thing about Indiana, much less what it was like 90 years ago.

“Only a little. We have these things out there called ‘houses’ and ‘yards’. You might have heard of them?” Humor. Humor, he’s coming to realize, is key to distracting Rogers from any potential inaccuracies in his words. “And there wasn’t all this noise around all the time. You better believe it was the quietest time of my life, even with a crying baby sister around.”

It does get Rogers to laugh again, but quieter now. Then he falls silent, staring at his cards. Contemplating his next move? The soldier’s brow furrows. Rogers isn’t normally this still and quiet, what’s going on with him?

The soldier is about to ask, but before he can, Rogers lays his cards face down on the table with a sigh.

“You know...I’ve been checking up on old friends. Seeing where they are now.” Rogers says it haltingly, as if he doesn’t know how to broach the topic. The soldier would feel comforted by this, because at least he’s not the only one, but it’s a concerning shift in the conversation.

“And?” the soldier asks.

“Not that hard to dig up information on people these days, with the internet and all. The Invaders are...well. Namor is back to ruling Atlantis and just as reclusive and haughty as ever,” a smile begins to creep onto Rogers’s face, “and the Torch is still around, part of a team called the New Invaders, believe it or not. And he hasn’t aged a day either! The benefits to being an android, I guess.” Rogers chuckles, but it’s quickly tempered by sorrow. The soldier waits for him to continue, because he knows the Invaders were a five man team at minimum. There are more members Rogers hasn’t mentioned yet.

“And Toro...Toro is gone.” Rogers leans forward and places a hand on the soldier’s shoulder—almost the left, but he jerks himself quickly enough that his right shoulder is within Rogers’s reach instead. “I’m so sorry, Buck.”

Toro. Full name Thomas Raymond, if the soldier recalls correctly. One of the five main Invaders. Partner to the Human Torch, who was as much a father figure to him as Captain America had been a brother to Bucky. The only other Invader remotely close to Bucky’s age, and therefore one of his closest friends.

This is supposed to hurt, he realizes. This is supposed to be him coming to grips with the loss of his best friend. How does one mourn, the soldier wonders. Bucky does not strike him as the type to openly weep or show that he is hurt, which is a problem, because he needs to perform  _ something  _ for Rogers to convince him that he is, in fact, upset by this news.

Apparently his blank stare into the middle distance is a convincing enough performance, because Rogers continues, in a tone so quiet and gentle,

“I also looked up the Young Allies. I know how much they meant to you.” The soldier hardly dares breathe; if these Allies were so important, the history books didn’t seem to know it. He’d come across the name of the group once or twice, but he knows nothing about its makeup or its operations or when it was active. Only that Bucky was its public face and widely considered to be their leader. But Rogers continues, “Hank Tinkelbaum and Geoffrey Vandergill have also died, they’re buried in Arlington. Wash Jones and Pat O’Toole are still alive in a nursing home together.”

The soldier is suddenly overcome by something he can only describe as guilt. These words aren’t meant for him. He doesn’t know any of these people. None of this has any meaning for him. Bucky is the one who should be hearing these words, but he’s not around to receive them. Rogers is providing comfort to him, as if Bucky isn’t just as dead as all these friends of his.

Rogers is searching his face for something. The soldier doesn’t know what, and he’s scared to breathe, as if doing so will give Rogers something else that will out him.

“Do you...want to go visit them?” he asks eventually, maintaining eye contact with the soldier that he really, really, really doesn’t want to maintain.

The soldier ducks his head and jerkily shakes his head no. He’s tense from the stress of this high stakes charade, but Rogers takes it to be from grief. Thank goodness.

But he’s not done yet, because Rogers follows up in an even quieter tone,

“What about Toro? He’s buried here in the city, you know. In Brooklyn.”

The soldier shakes his head again. Absolutely not. He knows that declining to visit any of Bucky’s friends, alive or dead, will look suspicious, but it would be even more suspicious to show up at their graves and have no idea how to react. Better to let Rogers reach whatever conclusions he might about ‘Bucky’s’ reluctance than mess it up and give Rogers the opportunity to realize he’s not really him.

Rogers scrutinizes him silently, and the space between each heartbeat feels like an eternity. Is this it? Has he figured it out? How on earth is the soldier going to extract himself if he has? If it comes to a fight, how important is it to maintain secrecy over his survival? Does Pierce need Rogers alive more than he needs the soldier? Does— 

Rogers finally sighs and stands up, giving the soldier some space. Thank god. He’s in the clear for now. 

And if Rogers stares at his back as he quickly retreats to the bedroom and slams the door shut behind him, well. Let him think that his best friend is grieving.

* * *

Later that evening, after he collects himself, the soldier steps out for ‘a walk’, the note that Natasha had slipped him last week carefully hidden in his pocket.

The address turns out to be a rowdy sports bar the night of a football game. It’s loud and it’s crowded and it’s perfect cover to protect them from anyone who might think about eavesdropping. They’re sat at a small booth, mere feet from the bar where dozens of drunken fans gather to cheer for their team, but it might as well be silent for the both of them.

They stare at each other. Again. The soldier raises an eyebrow, beckoning her. She’s the one who called him here, after all. Eventually, Natasha yields. 

“I didn’t think the Red Room was still in operation.”

“Well, you know how things go. Things get lost in the shuffle here and there.” They both know that the Red Room was too valuable to simply be disbanded when the Soviet Union fell apart. It isn’t entirely a lie, though—in the chaos of the early 90s, the Red Room did lose track of many records, funding, and materials, including the Winter Soldier. Not that he’d known it until he woke up one day to a new set of employers.

But of course, Natasha doesn’t know all that. She stares intensely at him behind the shroud of a friendly gaze. He doesn’t know what she’s trying to discern. But it doesn’t particularly matter.

“So what brings you here, to SHIELD?”

“New job, obviously.” She raises an eyebrow at him. That didn’t answer her question at all, and they both know it. “Don’t worry, no one’s going to die—not on this op, at least.”

Natasha gives him a skeptical look. There’s a dead Latverian diplomat who would beg to differ. The soldier merely shrugs.

“Never said I wasn’t working other ones too. For  _ this  _ one, though, my boss has decided I should branch out and try my hand at intelligence work.” He gives her a lazy grin. “Got any tips for a newbie?”

She smirks at him in return. “Now that would be cheating. Is that why you’re pretending to be Captain America’s old wartime buddy?”

“Telling you that would also be cheating.” He leans forward on the table separating them. “Besides, you don’t know, I might really be him.” She just rolls his eyes at him. Edging any closer to this topic is dangerous, though, so, accepting that he won’t be getting those espionage tips, he presses on. “What about you? I didn’t expect to see you at SHIELD.”

Natasha purses her lips for a moment, then: “I work there too. Have been for a while now. It’s...less spying and more bodyguarding and extraction.”

“Huh. What led you to the career change?” the soldier asks.

Natasha’s hands curl around her barely-touched glass of beer. Her lips thin out in a grimace of a smile. “I got tired of spilling blood for someone else’s agenda.”

The soldier turns this concept over in his head as he watches her nails tap rhythmically against the glass. Saving lives had never been a priority for the Red Room, so they’d never trained for it. While the rest of the world may care for life, the nature of their work meant they couldn’t. It was an ugly, necessary compromise they had to make in order to do the dirty work of saving their country (and the world) from itself.

The soldier had never considered there was another option.

What led Natasha to this, he wonders. Was it emotion? The soldier can’t think of any other logical reason for this change in attitude. He isn’t even sure what emotion it is that one is supposed to feel for a dead body; he’d either forgotten or never known at all. 

What changed her mind? What had he missed in his last bout under the ice?

“I...see.” He can feel her gaze on him as he furrows his brow, trying desperately to piece together this new understanding of his former student and partner.

“You don’t,” she says, with a small, regretful smile. “That’s why I am where I am and you are where you are.”

The soldier has nothing to say to that, so he just hums.

“Well,” she says with the slightest grin on her lips, “it was good to see you again, Zimka.”

He laughs despite himself. “You’re still calling me by that silly name?”

“Please, tell me more about silly names,  _ Bucky _ .”

* * *

By the time Bucky returns home from his evening walk around the neighborhood, Steve has gotten hungry. He’s rummaging around in the fridge when he hears the front door open.

“Oh hey,” he says, still scanning the food before him. “I’m gonna have the rest of the scrambled eggs. That okay with you?”

Bucky shrugs in what he assumes is assent. Steve pulls out the plate of leftover eggs covered in foil. He sticks it in the microwave and punches in a minute, because that sounds like a good starting point when he has no metric for how long this thing should be used.

It only takes a few seconds before the plate starts sparking wildly. Steve is pretty sure it isn’t supposed to do that.

Then it bursts into flame and the smell of something burning starts wafting from it. Okay, it’s  _ definitely _ not supposed to do that.

That’s when Bucky scrambles back into the kitchen, alarmed by the scent of smoke, and stares at the microwave, then Steve, then the microwave again.

“What the  _ fuck _ ,” he shouts and lunges forward, mashing the ‘stop’ button. The hum of the microwave turns off but the inside is still lit by flames. Now that the machine is off, though, Bucky rounds on Steve, furious.

“What the fuck was  _ that _ ,” he shouts.

“What?” Steve yells back, affronted by the sudden hostility.

“Why the hell did you put  _ foil  _ in the  _ microwave _ ?!”

“Why wouldn’t I? What, is there a list of things I can or can’t put in there?”

“ _ Yes! _ ” Bucky shouts, exasperated, like this is the most obvious thing in the world and Steve is monumentally stupid. “Yes, there is! You never put metal in there, or  _ that  _ happens!” Bucky jabs a finger back at the microwave. The flame, at least, seems to be dying down. Steve bristles.

“Well, how the hell was I supposed to know that?! I wasn’t exactly given a manual, and it’s not like  _ anybody explained it to me! _ ”

Bucky opens his mouth to respond, but apparently decides better of it, lips sealed tensely shut and fixing Steve with a narrowed glare.

“Fuck this,” he says while throwing his arms up and stomps into the bedroom, slamming the door shut behind him.

Steve grinds his teeth and forces himself to exhale. What a stupid fucking argument. If it was so important not to put metal in the microwave, why didn’t Bucky mention it earlier? Surely this had been emphasized to him when he learned about them; why hadn’t he passed that knowledge on to Steve?

The fire has finally died down, so he yanks open the microwave door and pulls out the plate. He just barely resists the urge to throw the whole plate, eggs and foil and all, into the trash and instead rips the foil off. Looking at the still-cold eggs, Steve realizes his appetite’s ruined for the night anyway. Sighing, he slides the eggs and the foil into the trash and throws the plate into the sink to deal with later.

What a headache.

* * *

“What’s this? Looks like a big audio spike on bug #2 tonight. Pull up the recording, let’s see what it’s about.”

…

“Sir, it appears to be...an argument about the microwave.”

“The...microwave?”

“Yes. Apparently Captain America put foil in the microwave and he and the soldier had a screaming match over it.”

“Jesus Christ. Did we at least get any valuable intel out of...this?”

“No, sir, not at all.”

_ “Jesus Christ.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve Rogers is a Lower East Side kid and I will die on this hill.
> 
> I promise this chapter was not endorsed or paid for by Katz's Deli, nor have I ever been there. It just happened to be a very convenient pre-WW2 landmark in Steve's old neighborhood. All other details, including Goerck Street, are accurate to the best of my knowledge. Shout out to the NYPL digital collection of photos taken in the 30s by the NYC Tenement House Department. If you can find the exact block I used as reference for Steve's home, you win...something.
> 
> "Zimka" is derived from the fact that the Russian word for winter ("Zima") is pretty close to the Russian name Dima, a nickname for Dmitriy. (Yes, the emphasis is on the wrong syllable, but it's the closest possible name to the word.) Dima can be further nicknamed to the very informal "Dimka," which conversely results in "Zimka." Given that the Winter Soldier didn't really have a name, I like to think that Nat employed some wordplay in giving him one.
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["Fulcrum & Lever" by The Faint](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VN-qaiKtVw4), aka some of the strongest musical vibes for this fic.
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com).


	4. There Is a Weight On This Place

Vacation is over. Apparently all the hubbub about the Latverian diplomat is done with, and whatever Fury did must have worked because that nuclear war he’d been yelling about hadn’t come to pass.

Which means Steve is back to aid missions with Brooks. Putting them out of his mind for a week had been a breath of fresh air, but now the reality is crashing back down. He’s trying to keep his chin up and do the work, play the long game like Bucky suggested. But he can’t help feeling useless, especially when he’s now being sent on ‘aid missions’ to parts of the country where, it seems, nothing has happened at all. No disasters, nothing.

He chances Brooks’s ire by asking him one day. In return, he just gets a scrutinizing glare.

“Not all disasters are so obvious to the eye, Rogers. The world’s got bigger, more complicated problems than you can see.”

Steve bristles at the non-answer, but he really didn’t expect anything less. Brooks has consistently been unhelpful and even combative towards him; by his standards, this response was even  _ nice _ . Steve’s not gonna get any better answers out of him. 

He tries speaking to his squadmates about it as well, but either Brooks has declined to fill them in on what they’re doing either, or they simply don’t want to talk to Steve. All he gets from any of them is a shrug or a glare or “that’s above my paygrade, and yours.”

At least Bucky has promised to do some digging around to see if he can find any information to put Steve’s mind at ease. He feels like he’s going to explode soon if he doesn’t get a decent answer for why these ops seem to be so useless. It’s a little sneaky, but Bucky always could be sneaky when he wanted. And Steve respects the chain of command so long as he trusts in it—and right now, he doesn’t.

He’s grateful for the few days he gets between missions, at least. It means time where he can pretend he isn’t wildly frustrated and can think about anything else. Which is what has him flipping aimlessly through TV channels on a day off. Bucky’s off at work—some kind of overtime thing that’s had him gone for several days so far—and he needs something to distract him from how frustrated he’s getting.

Amazing, how the future has so many channels on television and none of them have anything worth watching.

He flips past a news channel, but quickly goes back to it when the chiron catches his eye. “Minister of Foreign Affairs in Latveria Found Dead; Position Now Falls to Unpopular Son.” 

Huh.

He’s still catching up on current world affairs, but he recognizes Latveria from the diplomat’s death a few weeks ago. Fury was yelling about it, he remembers.

* * *

When he runs into Black Widow in the SHIELD hallway the next day, Steve pounces at the lucky encounter. He stops her for a ‘small chat’, and after the requisite small talk, he gets straight down to business:

“Who’s the Winter Soldier?”

She raises her eyebrow. “What?”

“Fury mentioned him a couple weeks ago after the Latverian diplomat died. He sounded mad about him. But none of the news on the diplomat ever mentioned any Winter Soldier. So who is he?”

“What makes you think I know who he is?” she asks.

Now it’s Steve’s turn to raise an eyebrow at her. “You’re a spy, aren’t you? Knowing things is your job.”

Black Widow stares at him for several awkward moments. Finally, she breaks eye contact and lets out a small sigh, arms wrapped around herself. The uncertainty looks odd on her.

“He’s...a legend of sorts in the intelligence community. Known for quick hits and suspiciously convenient accidents. No one’s been able to find him, he tends to vanish for years at a time. Some people think he’s just a boogeyman invented to explain away coincidences or cold cases.” She whips her eyes back onto Steve’s face. “He’s also the man who saved you during the alien invasion.”

Steve is rooted in place. He’d put that incident out of his mind, chalking the man up to a random SHIELD operative, but now he’s scrutinizing every second of his memory again. He’s never seen the man since, not on any missions or around SHIELD. And Black Widow…

“You knew who he was,” he says. “When I asked around if people knew who he was. No one else knew anything, but you had a look on your face.”

“I’ve...had encounters with him before.” Steve waits for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t.

“And he doesn’t work for SHIELD either, does he? Fury wouldn’t have been scrambling like that over something one of his own agents did.” Steve’s eyebrows knit together in thought.

Black Widow purses her lips and says, “If you want to know more about him…just be careful. It’s dangerous to dig too deep into this.”

And before he can question her further, she’s already walking past him, speedy footfalls echoing down the hallway.

* * *

Another day, another mission. This time, though, it isn’t for aid. No one’s said as much, but it’s obvious; instead of delivering supplies somewhere, they’re retrieving something. That’s all he knows until they arrive at Camp Lehigh.

Steve nearly stumbles into another soldier, so distracted is he by the sight of this old army base. He’s spent some time here before, either when meeting Bucky or on the few occasions they were undercover as regular soldiers here while they focused on taking out pro-Nazi groups in the area. The base is clearly decommissioned, the way all the buildings are exactly as he remembers, but damaged from weathering decades of damage with no repair. 

Looking at it, Steve no longer wishes the Lower East Side had stayed the same. There’s nothing here but decay and disrepair, fond memories overshadowed by barrenness. Nothing can stay the same, he realizes; time marches on whether he likes it or not, and better to embrace it than to be left behind to rot in the dust.

More than anything, though, all he can think of is that this, all this, was Bucky’s. He’d lived here for years, called these barracks home. A part of Steve wishes he could be here to see it. Part of him doesn’t want him to see the disrepair. (A part of him thinks Bucky wouldn’t be so sentimental as to care at all.)

“Rogers!” barks Brooks. “Move it!”

Steve startles and marches into step with the other soldiers.

They enter a building and eventually come across a door emblazoned with, strangely, the SHIELD logo. Steve knew that SHIELD wasn’t exactly a new agency, it had been started only 15 years or so after the war, but he didn’t realize they’d had an outpost at Camp Lehigh. 

Brooks swings the door open and points an arm inside.

“Alright, men! Today we’re excavating old files and data from this office. Go in and take everything, I mean  _ everything _ , that isn’t bolted to the damn ground. I don’t care if you think it’s a piece of trash, you take it. And if any of you damage anything, you’ll be discharged on the spot! For the love of god, check for wires before you start pulling shit out.”

The men nod and file into the room. Steve can’t help but stare at everything as he enters. It’s a room full of screens and computers and tape decks—every form of recording and computing format he can possibly imagine. A console filled with buttons, knobs, more screens, and monitors mounted atop it sits in the middle of the room. Apparently, whatever data is stored in this room is important enough for SHIELD to send an entire squad out to collect it...but what could be so important and yet be so old as to have gathered a thick layer of dust in a decommissioned army base?

“Well? Get a move on!”

Brooks’s orders get him moving. Steve makes his way to the walls, where the computer towers look more detachable and removable. He can manage unplugging and transporting these, and leave the console to the others. He doesn’t want to mess with something where he can’t tell where the off switch is, lest he ruin something in the process.

It takes them a good four hours or so with all hands on deck, but soon the room has been as thoroughly excavated as possible. The console remains, but Steve knows its interior has been utterly scavenged, every chip and hard drive and whatever else those things are called scraped out. The walls are bare, marked only by ghostly stains where computers once stood. Wires stick out from the floor and the walls where equipment had to be carefully severed.

Instead, it’s all been loaded onto a series of trucks, which Brooks now directs them to board for the ride back to New York. As he hauls himself into one of the trucks and stares at the mass of equipment all loaded up together, he has to wonder what the hell all this is. He chances a question to Brooks about it, and gets back a:

“If you want to ask so many damn questions, go back to school, Rogers.”

As the trucks pull away, Steve can’t help but turn back to give Camp Lehigh one last look. This empty shell of a place he knew well, this rotting carcass that once was Bucky’s home. He commits every aspect of it to memory, both for himself and for Bucky. Not that he can even share the sight of this base with Bucky, not without a camera on him, but he still feels like he owes it to him to remember.

* * *

She starts by searching SHIELD employee directories. There’s not much to be gleaned here, but she likes to start small and work her way up; going from the most obvious, surface level information to the deeper things beneath. From there, it’s easier to untangle the lies in between.

Sure enough, the directory doesn’t tell Natasha much. James Buchanan Barnes, hired exactly one month ago, two weeks after Steve Rogers. Works in administration on the third basement floor. Reports to Anne Turin, who reports to Harold Regent, who reports to Gene McLuren, who reports to Alexander Pierce. She hadn’t known about his management hierarchy, so she tucks that away in the corner of her mind, in case it becomes useful.

Next, she interviews people who work in administration near “Bucky.” She doesn’t know his exact desk, but doesn’t need to. Not like it matters anyway; no one there knows who she’s talking about. They have two James Barneses in the department, but neither go by Bucky or have Buchanan for a middle name. Not surprising—Natasha knew he wasn’t actually doing whatever admin work he claimed to be doing, it was just a cover for his real work. Unfortunately, what that work is, exactly, is still a mystery to her.

What Natasha doesn’t understand is, why go to all the trouble of making the soldier go undercover as Bucky Barnes and make him live alongside Steve Rogers, but then make him work a desk job within SHIELD’s offices? If the soldier’s employers need information from SHIELD, it’d be less risky to send him in as some anonymous new hire. If they need information from Steve Rogers, they’d get more out of him if they had the soldier working alongside him, ready to extract information from their apartment as well as on the field. Instead, this is straddling some strange middle ground she can’t figure out.

So she talks to the receptionist in SHIELD’s lobby. Once she verifies her identity and clearance level with her, she’s more than willing to talk to Natasha.

“Oh, Bucky?” the young woman behind the desk says. “Oh, yeah! All the receptionists love him—he always says hello to us when he comes in, and sometimes he even brings us a muffin or a coffee in the morning!”

Making sure he’s being seen whenever he enters the building, surely to build an alibi in case someone asks around about him like Natasha is right now. She has to admit, for someone who doesn’t specialize in deep cover work like this, he’s not doing too bad a job. So far.

“Does he always come in to work the same time every day?” she asks the receptionist.

“Oh, no.” The young lady laughs. “None of us have been able to figure his schedule out, actually! We all figure he must be one of the field agents, because he’ll come in at all sorts of crazy hours. 9 AM some days, 11PM other days! We like to do little bets, trying to figure out whose shift he’ll come in on next.” 

There it is. The first slip-up. He may be good, but she’s the best.

Later that afternoon, she enters Fury’s office with no warning or preamble, casually sitting on his desk (and all the doubtless important documents on it that he was working on).

“So,” she says, because they are beyond shallow greetings and chitchat, “what do you think about Bucky Barnes?”

He sighs, accepting that he isn’t going to get any work done with Natasha sitting on it, and leans back in his seat.

“I  _ don’t _ . The guy’s a desk jockey now, so long as he keeps out of trouble I’ve got no reason to think about him.”

Natasha raises an eyebrow. “And  _ has  _ he kept out of trouble?”

“A hell of a lot more than his friend,” Fury grunts. “Haven’t spoken to Barnes at all, actually. I was too busy coordinating his return from the dead to talk to him, and after getting settled in, he hasn’t made a peep or come running to me.”

She hums. “Seems like you got him settled a lot faster than Steve Rogers.” She remembers Cap being in the infirmary for a good week, first to slowly bring him back up to a livable temperature, then reviving him, then making sure he was healthy. 

Fury shrugs. “Ask medical, I wasn’t exactly watching the whole time. But I bet defrosting one guy out of an iceberg gives you a hell of a lot of data to make it easier the second time you find one.”

“That is a pretty remarkable coincidence,” she says.

“Not when you consider they died in the same region at the same time. I’m almost more surprised we didn’t find them in the same one.” Fury sighs. “Crazy damn kid, though, medical hadn’t even given him the all clear yet and he started working just under a month ago anyway. He hasn’t done anything yet, but mark my words. The both of them are gonna give me headaches.”

“Wait,” Natasha starts, “ _ under _ a month?” 

Fury raises an eyebrow at her. “Exactly 29 days ago.”

There is a look in his eye that demands an explanation, but Natasha doesn’t have one to give. According to Bucky Barnes’s profile in the employee database, he began working exactly one month, 30 days, ago. What does it mean that Fury himself, the man who personally arranged for these two men’s lodging and employment, thought that Bucky started working a day later than he actually did?

This is the biggest clue she’s found so far, but she doesn’t know what to do with it—at least not yet. For all that Fury wants an explanation for this line of questioning, Natasha is going to keep her mouth shut until she knows what to make of all this. 

* * *

Steve is in the middle of cooking breakfast—a haphazard mess of scrambled eggs tossed with whatever odds and ends he found in the fridge—when Bucky comes out of the bathroom, rubbing a freshly smooth chin.

“Oh, hey,” says Bucky, walking to the fridge to fix himself a bowl of cereal, “I have to work today. If you’ve got time, stop by the pharmacy and get some more shaving cream, okay? We’re out.”

Steve nods, adding it to his mental list of errands.

It’s only as they’re both sat at the table eating their breakfasts that the nature of the request strikes Steve as odd.

Bucky doesn’t need to shave. He’d teased Steve mercilessly for it in the war, ribbing him for all the time he wasted shaving and making a mess, or his messy half-beard whenever he couldn’t manage a shave.

_ “You  _ wish  _ you had my perpetually smooth, clean look,” _ Bucky had said, with a wink and flirtatious hand on his chin, before scrunching his face up. _ “Let me have this—I’m more likely to bite the dust than get a chance to learn to shave.” _

He’d ended up being right; Bucky was still fresh-faced at 20 when they’d fallen off that rocket.

And yet, here before him sits a Bucky who not only has facial hair—he’s seen the man sport a five o’clock shadow plenty of times—but evidently knows how to take care of it. 

After running errands that day, Steve places a fresh canister of shaving cream on the bathroom sink. He’s missing something here, he just doesn’t know what. 

* * *

Steve’s missions continue to evolve in new ways. First they were relief aid trips across the country, then a mysterious equipment retrieval at Camp Lehigh, and now most recently he’s been doing relief abroad.

He hadn’t even realized that SHIELD could work abroad in the first place, he’d been under the impression it was more of a domestic agency. But clearly not, because this time, he found himself loaded up on a nine-hour flight to guard a warehouse in Serbia. It was surreal; one morning he woke up and had a bowl of cereal in his New York apartment, and by the end of the day, he was guarding supplies with a semi-automatic in the dead of night.

He got used to this kind of feeling in the war, the unpredictability of what came next and if you would even make it to tomorrow. But, he grumbles to himself, that was in a combat zone in a war. These are planned missions in peacetime. His COs have the time to coordinate these missions and communicate the details to their troops, but are choosing not to. Is this how all of SHIELD operates, or just Brooks?

He’s back home now after a week in Serbia. It’s midnight in New York, but Bucky’s gone at work, apparently, doing whatever important administrative work absolutely has to be done at midnight. Unfortunately, Steve is wildly jetlagged after this mission, so rather than go to bed, he sets about putting his mind to rest by researching what the hell is going on in Serbia to warrant SHIELD presence there.

After two hours of finagling with search engines on the internet, he finds nothing. No natural disasters had happened in that area of Serbia in months. There are occasional border skirmishes by Latveria, but from what he can tell, that has been the case along that border for decades. Nothing new, and certainly nothing so drastic as to require SHIELD intervention.

So what the hell did they send relief supplies to Serbia for?

He wants to ask Bucky, see if he knows anything from the admin side of things, and knows he should wait until he’s back home to do so. But his mind is racing and it’s not like he’s going to bed anytime soon, so he takes advantage of the concept of ‘texting.’

_ Do you know if SHIELD has any involvement in Serbia?  _ He sends. Then pauses, and adds more detail to explain just what the mission was and his confusion about what they were doing there.

He waits for a response impatiently, but the trouble with texting, he knows, is he’s not going to get an automatic response. So he busies himself with unpacking and cleaning the kitchen, keeping an ear out for a notification from his phone all the while.

It’s two hours later before Bucky responds.

_ No, but not surprising. Your group does occasional international aid. _

_ What aid, though? _ Steve shoots back immediately.  _ Everything seemed fine when I was there and I couldn’t find any news about anything that would require aid when I looked it up later. _

Another five minutes pass before he gets a follow-up.

_ No offense Steve but you probably have the googling skills of a third grader. You have to search for these things in a specific way. Besides, there might not be anything you can find anyway--local news tends to only be reported locally. Not enough English language media cares to report on every problem around the world. The info exists, it’s probably just in Serbian. _

Steve bristles at the jab against his googling, but it does provide more context to his search. What Bucky’s suggesting does sound reasonable, after all. Even the internet can’t be omniscient—not entirely in English, at any rate. Besides, it’s damn near impossible to distinguish between a lack of sources describing something real and something that doesn’t exist in the first place. 

He goes to bed soon after, still unsure about what he was doing in Serbia, but at least comfortable in the fact that humanitarian supplies had been brought there. 

* * *

An unexpected challenge of this mission is the downtime—or lack thereof. The soldier is used to getting rest between jobs, be it a few days with no work or a nice long nap in cryo. Now, when he finishes killing off the political figure of interest of the week, he has to go “home” and pretend to be a dead man in front of Captain America.

(He wouldn’t admit it aloud, but in a way, he’s starting to miss that tense week of ‘vacation’ he had to spend with Rogers. At least then he got sleep.)

Thankfully, between Rogers getting sent on longer, more frequent missions and the soldier’s increasingly erratic work schedule, they cross paths less and less. There’s a good chance that, whenever the soldier returns to the apartment, it’s empty and he gets some time to take a nap or, at the very least, not have to worry about playing babysitter for a minute.

After a few weeks, though, their schedules line up just right. Both of them are home, neither of them have anything coming up. Rogers hasn’t offered any information or tantrums to calm down, and the soldier hasn’t been told to needle him for anything, so they go about their days individually. The soldier dances around him, content not to engage Rogers unless needed, and calmly reads on the couch. Today he’s reading one of the thick tomes on World War 2, although he isn’t absorbing much of it, eyes barely scanning the words. Hey, at least it’s something to do.

He’s in the middle of rereading the same page for the third time when Rogers approaches the couch and gingerly takes a seat. Already, the soldier is on edge. There’s no reason for Rogers to be so gentle unless he’s approaching a sensitive topic—or, what he thinks Bucky thinks is a sensitive topic.

“Hey, Buck,” he starts, hesitant, as the soldier braces himself, “do you ever think about your family?”

Oh god, he was right to be nervous—another personal conversation that requires him to divinate the thoughts and feelings of a dead man. The soldier sets his book down on the coffee table with the same carefulness with which Rogers approached the couch.

“Not much,” he says, because family had never seemed like a big part of Bucky Barnes’s life. “Why?”

“Would you want to see them now, if you could?”

The soldier is already losing his patience. “Quit being cryptic, Rogers, it’s not a good look on you. Just say what you’re trying to say.” 

Rogers is taken aback. Shit, that tone and turn of phrase was too much the soldier and not enough Bucky. Rogers averts his eyes, focusing on the wall behind the TV than on the soldier himself.

“I found your sister. I’ve been looking her up along with all our friends, but it took me longer to find her because she changed her name.” He sighs. “She goes by Rebecca Proctor now. Got married, had kids and grandkids. She’s in hospice care now in a hospital in Indiana.”

Silence falls between them. The soldier is stunned, unsure of how to pretend to feel about this. Rogers, it seems, is trying to figure out what to say next. Eventually, he turns his head to look at the soldier.

“Would you...want to go see her?” he asks softly.

The soldier knows his answer, and it’s “no.” But he swallows his gut instinct. He’s already declined to visit any of Bucky’s friends or their graves, fearing it would reveal him as an impostor immediately. But Bucky Barnes loved his sister; all the books imply as much, though more than anything, he can hear it in Rogers’s gentle tone, trying to be sensitive to a man known for not being sensitive. 

He feels the noose tighten around him. If he says no, Rogers will be suspicious. If he says yes, who knows what Rebecca Proctor will see in him. He’s at risk of blowing his cover no matter what he does. He’ll just have to take his chances.

“Yeah,” he chokes out, finally. “Yeah, I would.”

And then, because he feels he’s gone too long without injecting some trademark Bucky wit into his interactions, adds, “But only because she still owes me a pack of gum.”

* * *

The soldier’s next visit to Pierce’s office is routine until his next mission details come up.

“Now,” Pierce says, gesturing down at an open file, “we have another target for you.”

He pushes some of the pages towards the soldier. A photo of the man, a brief and simple biography along with a list of family members.

“Leopold Bertalis. High up in the Latverian cabinet. We need this one to look like a suicide, your choice as to the exact method. Regardless, you’ll be leaving a note behind on his behalf.” Then Pierce drags over a notated calendar and begins pointing at marked dates. “You’ll go in one week, and you’ll have a 3 day window to get it done, understood?”

Pierce looks up, a prompt to the soldier to agree. Instead, he says, “Sir.” A pause to collect his words. Then, “I have...a conflict that week.”

Pierce’s posture shifts. “A conflict,” he says. The soldier can feel the air pressure in the room dropping.

“Yes. Rogers suggested we visit Bucky Barnes’s sister. The visit has already been scheduled, and it overlaps with the mission dates.” 

His employer fixes him with a scrutinizing stare. “And why,” he says, voice ever so gentle, ever so soft, “did you agree to that?”

The soldier schools his voice into disinterested neutrality. “Rogers has been...very interested in rekindling old relationships. He has already suggested we visit their old wartime friends. I declined past offers, but there are only so many I can refuse before it appears suspicious. In the interest of maintaining cover, I agreed. Rogers seems to believe that Bucky’s sister is very important to him—to refuse to visit her would have jeopardized my position.” 

Pierce continues to stare at him, and the soldier wonders what he sees, what he is looking for. He refuses to budge. But eventually, Pierce relents.

“Very well. This mission is not terribly time sensitive. I will move it back another week.” He makes a note on his calendar. “But avoid it if possible in the future. First and foremost, we need you to ensure the success of Project Insight.”

* * *

Bucky seems strangely quiet and tense all through their trip to Indiana. Through the airport and the taxi ride, Steve tries to crack jokes to lighten the mood, but either his sense of humor is worse than he thought, or Bucky’s just that distraught. He supposes he might be too, if he was meeting a sibling who was suddenly seventy years older than him and had lived an entire life without him. 

Especially if they were in anything resembling Rebecca Proctor’s condition.

So after several failed attempts, Steve gives up and lets Bucky travel in silence. He lets the monotony of the Midwest occupy his vision and his mind. Time, like the flat fields outside the car window, seemed to stretch into forever. He only snaps out of it with the sound of the car door opening, noticing they’ve finally reached Shelbyville Major Hospital. Steve fumbles for his wallet and pays the taxi driver before joining Bucky on the sidewalk outside the hospital. He doesn’t move.

Steve clears his throat. “We should go in.”

Bucky shakes out of—whatever state he was in and nods. “Right.”

They enter the hospital and give the receptionist their names; they’d called ahead last week to make visitation plans, just to make sure there were no restrictions or other issues that could prevent them from visiting. She hands them a pair of visitor passes and directs them to the Alzheimer’s Hospice wing on the fifth floor.

Once they step off the elevator, it’s a short walk through the ward before they find room 512, the one the receptionist had directed them to. Bucky simply stares at the placard for what feels like far too long. He must be scared, Steve thinks. They spent years fighting in the front lines of a war, but Bucky hasn’t seen his sister in years, and knows how much he cherished her even at a distance. Coming to see her after everything must feel like crossing a rubicon. Once he opens that door, there is no coming back.

Steve clears his throat. “You ready?”

Bucky turns to look at him, hesitates, then nods. He takes a deep breath, opens the door, and steps in, Steve just behind him for moral support.

It’s rather a nice room, for a hospital. It’s furnished almost like a bedroom one might find at home, albeit with some more medical equipment than usual. There’s a plush armchair and a pair of other cushioned seats along the wall. A couple of potted plants dot the corners of the room, one by the chairs and one by a homey beige-and-gold bedside table. Resting upon it is a lamp, and along the wall are elegant sconces that, Steve imagines, emit a much warmer light than the overhead fluorescent lighting in the rest of the hospital. Not that he can tell, though, because they’re turned off in favor of letting in the natural light from the enormously prominent window. It’s open, and so a soft breeze rustles the delicate, gauzelike curtains.

And in the middle of it all, propped up in a hospital bed covered in warm blankets and cozy pillows, rests a frail and elderly woman. She squints at them from across the room. 

“Oh! Bucky!” She sits up just a bit straighter. “It’s been so long since you last visited. Please, please, sit down! How’s college going?”

“Um,” says Bucky. Steve tries not to go rigid. They both knew she wasn’t quite all there any more, but it’s one thing to know and another to experience directly. But she continues on as if she hasn’t noticed Bucky’s discomfort—or thinks it’s typical of him to be so flustered. A funny idea, Steve thinks, considering Bucky’s usually the one flustering others.

“Oh, don’t worry, I already know, your father’s told me all about it. I want to hear about everything else! Tell me, Jim-jam, have you found a girlfriend over there yet?” She winks at him.

Bucky blinks in shock and Steve can barely hold back his laughter.

“Jim-jam?” he asks with an incredulous grin.

The woman laughs, sounding much fuller than she looks. “Oh, of course you didn’t tell your friends! I bet you thought you thought you were getting a fresh start once you got those fancy red and blue tights of yours. But not as long as I’m still around!” She waves her hand conspiratorially at Steve, who makes a show of leaning in with a hand cupped to his ear.

“Way back when, before I was even born, Bucky  _ loved  _ to put jam on his breakfast toast. Mama told me he’d always make a mess—dig his filthy mitts right into the jam and spread it all over the toast, the table, his face, anything he could reach!” Becca laughs. “She said she had to hide the jam and if he wanted any, she’d have to spread it herself for him until he was old enough to know better. But by then it was too late—she called him Jim-jam all the time. And oh, how he  _ hated  _ it. Which meant, it was my God-given right, no, my  _ duty _ , to call him that as much as I could! Isn’t that right, Jim-jam?” 

Becca looks over at her brother with a fond grin, but he looks flustered and alarmed. Maybe he wasn’t expecting to have such ancient, embarrassing history dug up today. Although Steve can’t imagine how he’d think that, given that apparently mischief and teasing run in the Barnes family.

“That’s not—that can’t—” he sputters. Steve can’t help but laugh.

“Just because I wasn’t there doesn’t mean I don’t know about it! Mom entrusted me with this so I could hold it over your head for the rest of your life!” There’s mirth in her voice, but the atmosphere has suddenly become more somber. 

She must miss her mother, Steve thinks. Bucky must, too. They’d both lost her when they were so young. It’s strange to think about, in fact. Bucky’s told him a few things about his old man in the army, how his reputation clung to Bucky around base after he died, how he was the one to begin calling him Bucky when there were too many Jameses around to keep straight and ‘Buchanan’ was too much of a mouthful. But he’s almost never spoken about his mother before. This is like peeking behind a curtain he didn’t know even existed. He wonders how long it’s been since either of the Barnes children thought of her. He wonders how long it’s been since they  _ haven’t  _ thought of her.

“Oh, Jim-jam…” Becca says, suddenly sounding every bit her age, “I feel like I’ve missed something. I feel like I’ve missed  _ everything _ .” She beckons him closer, so he leans in. She begins caressing his face with her hands. “You’re a grown man now, and I missed all of it.  _ You  _ missed all of it.” Her hands drop and tears gather at the corners of her eyes. “I wish you could’ve been at my wedding, Bucky. Instead, all I had was a photo of you.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky croaks helplessly. “I didn’t mean to miss it.”

“Why don’t you ever reply to any of my letters?”

“I did, every moment that I could,” Bucky whispers in response, but Becca shakes her head.

“Not anymore,” she says. “Not for a long time.”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky repeats, quieter this time. The siblings sit there like that for what feels like ages, eyes downcast with an awkward silence between them, until Bucky clears his throat. “What did you tell me about in them?”

Becca takes the offered olive branch with a forgiving upturn of her lips and begins to describe her life in a meandering path. Her career as a teacher, her husband Thomas, her children and grandchildren, even the time she ran off on a road trip with her friends in 11th grade without telling anyone at the boarding school about it. Her stories are winding, cut short and jump back and forth seemingly at random, and her asides have asides. Steve has a hard time keeping up with it all, but Bucky sits mutely, absorbing every word.

It’s then that an aide enters the room to give Becca her medication. Upon spotting her visitors, the aide stands up a little straighter.

“Oh! Hello,” she says. 

“Anna,” says Becca, “this is my brother, Bucky! You remember, I’ve told you about him. He’s even visited a few times before.”

The aide presses a small variety of pills into Becca’s hand and passes her a glass of water. As Becca busies herself with the medicine, the aide looks over Bucky and Steve.

“Yes, Becca’s always had so much to say about you, Bucky.” Her smile is gentle, but also wistful. “She’s given us quite the impression of you. Unfortunately, it’s nearly six, so visiting hours will end soon.” She collects the empty glass of water from Becca. “I’ll give you some time to wrap up.”

The aide leaves the room and after that, it seems no one has anything left to say. After all, with so little time left, embarking on any other conversation feels like a lost cause. Instead, they say their goodbyes. Becca clasps Bucky’s hand between her own and gives him a watery grin.

“Jim-jam,” she says, “it was so, so good to see you again. Don’t forget about me?”

“Of course not,” he mutters. With their final goodbyes, and Steve declaring how glad he is to have met her, they leave.

They enter the hospital hallway and begin heading for the exit when the aide, Anna, calls for them. They turn and see her rushing from down the hall where she must have just finished with another patient.

“Are you...really Bucky Barnes? Becca thinks you’ve visited before, but I know all her visitors, and we’ve never seen you here before.” she asks, her eyes searching Bucky for some way to tell that it really is him.

Bucky nods.

“It’s kind of a long story, but yeah. It’s really me.” And as proof, he pulls out his wallet and shows the aide his SHIELD-issued legal ID. “Just...don’t spread it around, okay? There’s a reason it isn’t public knowledge yet. We just…” In the most minute of gestures, Bucky’s eyes tilt downward so slightly. “We just had to make an exception for my sister, y’know?”

The aide keeps searching him for something, and she must find it, because eventually she relents and nods.

“Then in that case, I think you should have her letters.”

Bucky blinks. “What?”

“She’s written dozens of letters to you since she came here, and she always asks us to mail them to you, but, well...the address doesn’t exist anymore and you were dead. The first few were returned to sender, so after that, we just began holding onto them for her. But if you’re really here,” the aide says, looking Bucky directly in the eyes with the most determined look Steve has seen from her yet, “then I think you should have them. They were meant for you to begin with.”

Bucky is taken aback; he holds himself like this information is a physical blow. Steve glances at him and is surprised to see that he looks horrified and vaguely sick. He works his mouth for several moments before he’s able to actually verbalize anything.

“Yes. Please. I’d love that,” he croaks. “And I’m—I’m sure Becca would too.” 

* * *

And that’s how they leave Shelbyville Major Hospital with Bucky clutching a shoebox to his chest like it’s Pandora’s box; powerful and divine, but terrible in its overwhelming power from the mysteries contained inside.

“I can carry that if you want, you know,” he offers weakly, but Bucky shakes his head jerkily.

“It’s fine.”

Steve lets it go after that.

He doesn’t know what to make of the letters, or the entire visit as a whole. Bucky behaved very strangely, quiet and restrained around Becca. He’d hoped that Bucky seeing his sister would be...positive in some way. Not necessarily happy, but at the very least it would provide some form of closure or reconciliation. But instead, it seems to have rattled him. Steve underestimated how jumbled Becca’s memories would be; how painful it might be to see family that keenly felt his absence, but couldn’t remember it.

He feels guilty for even suggesting the visit, seeing how off-kilter Bucky is now as they return to the airport. He can only hope that Bucky won’t regret having gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Giving him the nickname "Jim-jam" is an extremely specific reference, and if you know what it is, then we are kindred spirits.
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["In And Out of Lightness" by Young Widows](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxFINu849DM).
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com/).


	5. The Singularity

When they get home, Bucky retreats to the bedroom immediately in silence. He doesn’t come out for the rest of the night and when Steve goes to bed himself, Bucky has already fallen asleep.

The next day, Bucky is still asleep when he wakes up. By the time Steve comes out of the bathroom after brushing his teeth, though, he realizes Bucky must have gotten up, because the bedroom door he had left open is now shut. Huh.

Steve goes back into the bedroom to change into his clothes for the day--or he intends to, at least, but he stops short when he spots Bucky sitting on his bed, hunched over a book and trembling.

“Uh,” he says eloquently.

Bucky immediately jerks upwards. “Oh—shit, uh—” Was that a sniffle? Bucky slams the book shut and sets it on the bed behind him, as if he’s trying to hide the book from Steve.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks.

“Yeah, it’s—nothing, just. Nothing to mention. Sorry about that.” Bucky coughs, as if to clear his throat. Steve can tell it’s to try and cover the fact that he was crying, or close to it. “What did you need?” 

“Just have to get dressed.”

“Right.” And with that, Bucky grabs the book and swiftly exits the room.

* * *

The soldier has a shoebox full of letters addressed to a dead man in the drawer of his nightstand, but he can’t bring himself to read them. Even though he’s been impersonating Bucky Barnes for months now, looking at those letters feels like a boundary he can’t cross. They’re not meant for him.

Instead, he pores over Bucky Barnes’s biography once again. That, at least, is a sanitized version of the man’s life, meant for public consumption. But even that much now feels...achingly nostalgic somehow.

He had always read Bucky Barnes’s biography impassively. It was, after all, a book on a historical figure, albeit one he had to pretend to be himself. The words were dry and empty, little more than a means to the end of fooling a man into thinking he was someone else.

But now, the way Becca Barnes spoke during their visit about her brother Jim-jam and their good-natured ribbing somehow makes the book, makes _Bucky_ , feel all the more real. Where the man had once been an abstract concept, a historical figure reduced to words and carefully manicured newsreel footage, he now seems like a person who once had a life, a childhood, a sister that he loved and who loved him back.

Looking at the photos of the letters Bucky and his sister had sent to each other through the war now leaves a knot in his throat. He can hear Becca reading each of the letters in her own voice, can see the intense care she put into writing every one of them in perfect cursive even though she’d always struggled with her r’s and capital G’s. And where, before, he’d read Bucky’s responding letters as cheerful tales from a cocky kid wanting to impress his sister, he now sees the underlying current of heartache in them.

 _Some schmuck thought he could beat me at darts, so we bet all our smokes and chocolate on it. Even Steve got in on it, because he knew I had this one in the bag. Well, sure enough, I thrashed poor Willy and won the whole pot, but I decided to let him keep all the cigs since Steve and I don’t smoke and chocolate’s better anyway,_ reads the letter.

 _I miss you,_ is what it actually says. _I miss you every day but I’m so glad you’re safe. I hope I’m the worst thing you have to worry about in your life, because it’d mean everything else is going pretty well. I hope you have plenty of friends and that they tease you about boys they think you like. I miss you but I’m so glad you’re far away, where you can think of me as a proud hero winning the war instead of the lousy kid who was too busy picking fights to be a good brother to you._

How had he missed that before? It’s so obvious in hindsight. The sight of these photocopied letters makes him ache now, and for a moment, he thinks that maybe he can even feel a phantom limb tracing Bucky’s words by candlelight under the cover of night, always alone because he didn’t want anyone to see him at his most vulnerable.

It’s a good thing the soldier hasn’t opened the shoebox, because he doesn’t think he could bear it.

* * *

With their trip to Indiana complete, Bucky is thrust back into his work. Only a few days later, he vanishes in the dead of night, only leaving behind a sticky note on the kitchen counter saying an emergency came up and not to expect him back for a few days. 

Steve, on the other hand, has nothing to do currently. He has no missions coming up, unless something urgent happens, so he has a few impromptu days off. He spends much of it watching TV and, inexorably, he finds himself gravitating towards the news. There are so many news channels, so many sites, so many articles everywhere that he feels like he’s drowning in it all the time. Steve knows that just as many things were happening constantly all over the world in his time, too, but it certainly feels like there’s more now just from the sheer volume of it.

Which is how he discovers that Latveria keeps popping up in the news. This time, it’s about Leopold Bertalis, Minister of the Interior of Latveria. His security detail found his body hanging from a noose in a hotel room, leaving behind a note that declared an obscure third cousin twice-removed his successor to the position. It’s being ruled a suicide, but some people believe that the note is evidence of foul play, a way of getting this distant cousin into power.

Steve doesn’t know what to think either. It does feel oddly suspicious, given the prior two dead Latverian politicians, but he can’t tell if it’s a coordinated effort by a very determined party, or if Latveria is just experiencing major upheaval right now. He doesn’t honestly know a whole lot about the place.

When Bucky finally returns after his work emergency, Steve is too curious to keep from asking.

“Hey, what do you know about all this Latveria stuff?” he asks. “Looks like something’s heating up there.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “I doubt I know any more than you do. It’s not like SHIELD’s got anything to do with it.”

Steve furrows his brow. “Really?” Because between his mission to Serbia on the Latverian border and Fury’s panic at the diplomat’s death weeks ago, Steve is pretty damn sure SHIELD has got _something_ to do with it.

Bucky freezes, hesitates. And then shrugs. “If it does, it must be handled by some other department. I sure as hell don’t know anything about it.”

And that...well, Steve doesn’t know what to do with that answer.

* * *

The next day, Steve can’t help but feel blasphemous.

Technically Steve isn’t doing anything wrong. He has every right to be here, a nostalgic man whose personal effects fell into the hands of cultural institutions and who merely wants to see them again. The museum directors practically jumped at the opportunity to meet him in person. The perks to being an American hero, he supposes.

But he still feels guilt churning his gut. No one sees anything wrong with this but him. Perhaps because he’s the only one who knows the real reason behind this little visit to the New-York Historical Society.

“Oh, Mr. Rogers! It’s a pleasure to meet you,” gushes the museum director. “You can imagine, none of us here even dreamed of having the chance to meet you, so this is truly an honor.”

Steve gives her a gentle smile and raises his hand in his ‘aw, shucks, no need to flatter little old me’ gesture.

“Please. Thank you for making time for me on such short notice. I know I made a rather...unconventional request of you.”

The museum director shakes her head. “It’s the least we could do.”

The New-York Historical Society has a permanent exhibit on Captain America. Steve almost considered it a stroke of luck to find out that the largest collection of Captain America’s belongings was right here in New York, but he supposes it’s no coincidence. Hometown sentimentality and pride surely has to do with it. It _is_ , however, a stroke of luck that, after some research, he discovered that they also have a collection pertaining to Bucky as well, even if he isn’t the hometown favorite.

Most of the Bucky collection isn’t on display, though; unfortunately, the museum only has so much room, and Cap draws more of a crowd than Bucky ever did, much to Steve’s chagrin.

Which is why he’s now being shepherded by the director to the back rooms on a personal request, instead of just coming to the museum as a normal visitor. 

“Ah—please excuse the state of our offices,” says the director sheepishly as she holds open a door for Steve. “We do honestly try to keep everything neat and organized, but, well...sometimes we get a little overwhelmed.”

To Steve’s eyes, it doesn’t look too messy, but the director is still babbling as she begins shifting dusty boxes around.

“...but I promise you, we do our best to keep everything in the utmost—ah, here we go!” With a satisfied grunt, the director sets a box down on the ground between them. On the top of it the words ‘JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES, 1945’ are written.

“Let’s just open ‘er up, and…” The director gently lifts the flaps of the box. Steve feels like he can’t breathe suddenly, and it’s not just the dust. He takes a tentative step towards it and peers in, almost afraid to get too close lest it all crumble before his eyes.

“Just...be careful handling it all, okay? Some of these things are pretty fragile, and—well, technically no one except for the conservators are meant to touch these, but I couldn’t just say no to your request…!”

The director’s words fade out as Steve focuses on the contents of the box, almost reverent. A carton of cigarettes—Bucky wasn’t a smoker, but he liked to keep them on hand for trades with other soldiers and locals. A stack of letters, all meticulously saved in near-perfect condition—Bucky cherished every last letter he got from his sister, even if he tried to hide it; he’d reread them over and over sometimes on late nights when he didn’t think anyone was looking. His old mess kit, chipped and rusted to hell from all the times he’d used it as an improvised weapon. The bottle of cologne he’d traded for from a man in the French Resistance; Bucky and Toro always wore aggressive amounts of it any time they expected to meet women they could woo, even if they usually chased them off with their overwhelming scent.

He isn’t sure what he’s looking for here, exactly. But then, there at the bottom—Bucky’s old uniform. Or the backup one, at least, Steve recognizes the hasty patch job Bucky had done at just about waistline after a stab wound there. Of course, he thinks, it would have to be the backup one. Because Bucky had died in his main uniform and his body hadn’t been recovered until this year. 

He pulls it out of the box gently and holds it up by the shoulders, letting it drape in front of him. As familiar as it is, as much as it’s making him feel like he’s being punched by the past the way nothing else has, something uncomfortable scratches at the back of his brain.

The size, he realizes with a startle.

He knows this uniform was specifically sized for Bucky. And yet, it looks far too small now. The Bucky he’s been living with for the past month would never be able to fit into this. He’s too broad-shouldered, too tall, his arms too large to fit into these sleeves. How had he not noticed it before? Bucky had been a good head shorter than him and deceptively small. Now he and Steve have such similar physiques that they’ve worn each other’s clothing by accident and not noticed it for hours.

But they’d both been frozen in ice for decades and pulled out at just about the same time. There’s no way Bucky should have been able to somehow finish out puberty in the ice. And yet...there’s no denying the physical proof before him.

Something is very, very wrong with Bucky. 

* * *

Steve makes his way home on autopilot, mind too preoccupied with trying to figure out what it is he’s just learned. What on earth could have possibly happened to make Bucky outgrow his old uniform so quickly? Did it happen after he came out of the ice? Did SHIELD somehow replicate the supersoldier serum and shoot him full of it too?

 _Or_ , his mind whispers, _that man isn’t Bucky at all._

And for a moment he’s back in the ice again, the thought chilling him to the very core. But it disappears quickly, because, well, what a silly idea. Obviously it’s Bucky; who else could it possibly be? Even if he’s bigger now, he’s the same person he’s always been. When he reappeared, Steve felt like the world finally righted itself again, immediately falling back into old habits and camaraderie with him.

Except...had he?

Steve sits on the subway numbly, the roar of the train through the tunnels drowned out by the roaring in his own ears.

They’d fallen back into old habits immediately, but they were all shifted by a few inches. Familiar, but slightly off. Bucky thought microwaves were obvious, even though they were a new invention to them both. He refused active duty for administrative work when Steve knew he loved the thrill of action. He was in the habit of calming Steve down after his missions and urging him to be patient, rather than the other way around. He was always reading, and they were always dry historical texts. He didn’t want to visit old friends or their graves. He used to be a chatterbox, always the first to initiate conversation, but now...

Now, he is _quiet_.

But, no. This is ridiculous. Of course it’s Bucky! SHIELD would know who it is that they hired, the doctors would know who it was they’d treated. Becca recognized him. There’s a legal ID in his wallet stating him to be, unequivocally, James Buchanan Barnes, born 1925. It has to be Bucky, because if it isn’t, then everything he knows and trusts about the world around him falls apart.

When he makes it home, he shuts the door behind him quietly and turns around to see Bucky watching him with a raised eyebrow, mid-page turn in one of his hefty World War 2 books. Steve suddenly feels like he’s swallowed a tennis ball.

“Hey,” Bucky says, “Have a good time at the museum? Find any relics?” He grins. “Besides yourself, I mean.”

 _Are you him? Are you real? Do I know you? Have I_ ever _known you?_

“Nah,” he says, forcing his rigid muscles into a facsimile of casualness, “guess I shoulda known I’m the best relic of them all.”

* * *

The day after Steve Rogers and “Bucky Barnes” return from their trip, she finds a note in her locker. An address and a time—the same bar where she met the soldier in private earlier. No doubt it’s him.

Immediately, she’s suspicious. She’d intended for that to be a one-time thing, not an invitation for some regular intel exchange session. Not that he would give her any intel besides, nor she to him; neither of them wanted to jeopardize their jobs. Is he going to confront her about the digging she’s been doing into Bucky Barnes’s records and coworkers? She’d spent the duration of their trip trying to dig up more information while the soldier was out of the way, but she’d had no breakthroughs since discovering that he started work a day earlier than Fury thought.

She shouldn’t go. This could very well be a trap.

But whether it’s curiosity, sentimentality for a former loved one, or the opportunity to dig for more information on his current mission, she finds herself at the bar again on another rowdy sports night, seated in the same booth as before. It doesn’t take long for the soldier to slip into the seat opposite her.

But then they lapse into silence. He called her out here, he has something he wants to discuss. And yet, he stares at his hands on the tabletop instead, flexing his fingers over and over. She waits, trying her best to be patient but feeling anything but.

Then— 

“Do you ever...think about life before the Red Room?” he blurts out. Natasha tilts her head to the side curiously. “Do you remember what it was like?”

The nonsequitur question gives her pause and short-circuits all her plans to interrogate him. This isn’t like him, to ask these sorts of things. The soldier was never one to linger on the past. He always focused squarely on the present and the future—whatever he was doing right now and what he’d have to do later. She never gave it thought at the time. Thinking about the past wasn’t something Red Room operatives did anyway. She knows now that that was because some of them—like herself—had their memories tampered with somehow and talking about them would only cause that thread to unravel until the truth came out.

“A little. Not much,” she says, her voice carefully measured.

“What was it like?” The soldier’s voice is thin and taut, as though stretching desperately over a gaping pit.

Natasha taps her fingers on the table surface carefully as she considers what to say.

“I ended up at the Red Room as a little girl. I hadn’t had much of a chance to live my life before.” At least, not in reality, not outside of those implanted memories.

“But…” She didn’t expect it to be so difficult to talk about her childhood, especially not with someone as close to her as the Winter Soldier. He is one of very few kindred spirits that she has. And yet, baring her soul, these few moments in her life before the Red Room tainted everything, fills her with trepidation. “...I do remember some things. Living with my parents in an apartment in Kharkiv. Summers spent at the dacha, picking berries and making jam for the winter…” Her lips almost turn up in a wistful smile. Almost. “They starved to death, like most everyone else at the time. I must have been four or five.”

And from there, the Red Room plucked her out of an orphanage to put her into the Black Widow program.

When she pulls herself out of her reverie, she notices the soldier has his face in his hands. Slowly, he drags them down his face before letting them fall to the table, hunching over to stare at them.

Neither of them say anything.

Until, finally:

“I don’t remember anything.” Natasha sits up a little straighter, but doesn’t say anything. The soldier takes a deep, shaky breath. “Nothing before the Red Room. I just—I never thought about it. It never came up. It didn’t matter.

“But now I can’t stop thinking about it.” He plays with his fingers, a nervous gesture she’s never seen from him before. “I must have had...parents, at some point. Right? I must have been born. What—what were they like? Did I—did I ever have a sister?”

Natasha can hardly breathe as she watches the soldier fold in on himself in a mess of nerves she never knew he had. In all the time she’s known him, she’s never seen him like this.

“What would you do if you knew?” she says softly. 

The way he curls in on himself further almost feels like a flinch, the way he buries his head further in his arms. He’s silent a few moments, and then, helplessly—

“I don’t know.” Eventually, he drags himself back up, looking exhausted. “I don’t even know if it matters now.” He casts his eyes downward and his tone takes on a bitter edge. “If I can’t remember it...it might as well not exist, right?”

She understands. She’d spent so many years of her life quietly carrying this idea in her head that she’d started as a ballet dancer with the Bolshoi Theater. So much of her identity had been wrapped up in the idea that she was an accomplished dancer who switched careers to proudly serve her country. When she realized that she wasn’t, that she’d never danced in her life, that all that muscle memory came from combat rather than ballet...she didn’t know what that meant for who she was.

Honestly, she still doesn’t.

Which is why she’s at such an utter loss for what to tell the soldier. How can she help him sort through an issue that she herself hasn’t yet? She has no advice to give him, not when she’s carefully shelved that problem herself out of an inability to untangle it.

She chews the inside of her cheek.

“Think of it,” she begins, “like that old thought experiment. ‘If a tree falls and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?’” 

He gives her a look of confusion. 

“There is no getting around the fact that...sometime, long ago, someone gave birth to a child who would eventually end up at the Red Room. That happened. Even if there’s no record of it, you sitting here right now is proof of that. 

“But how much that matters—whether or not you ‘heard it’—I think that’s up to you.” She makes sure he’s looking her in the eyes. “Are you content with who you are right now? Is what you have already enough? Or...do you need more?”

She reaches out across the table to curl her fingers around one of his hands.

“Do you want to pull on this thread?”

He stares at her before eventually nodding. Curt, just once. Then he directs his gaze back down at the table. She’s clearly given him a lot to think about. That’s fine—there’s nothing more for her to say. And this conversation has given her a lot to think about herself.

She pats his hand once, nods at him conclusively, and then stands up to leave and let him think. She needs to think, too. 

* * *

_If a tree falls and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?_

_Do you want to pull on this thread?_

The soldier honestly doesn’t know and it leaves him feeling helpless. Not a feeling he’s used to having.

Laying in bed that night long after Rogers has gone to sleep, he realizes he’s adrift. He lives his life in objective truths; orders, directions, statements of fact. _The target will arrive at the conference at 1300 and will be seated at 15E. It takes 5 to 15 seconds to die and up to 10 minutes to bleed out from a cut carotid artery. These are the seven factors necessary to calculate an accurate sniper shot._ Even if the soldier doesn’t know the answer, someone out there does. It feels good, it feels right, knowing that somewhere there exists a definitive truth for every matter out there.

To be told, for once, that there isn’t a right answer aside from the one he gives himself, it leaves him feeling unmoored, unbalanced.

_Are you content with who you are right now?_

He didn’t know until this moment that that was something he could have an opinion on. Or that it was his decision to make at all.

Or who he even is.

The Winter Soldier. Legendary assassin, loyal to the motherland, ghostly menace to the West, effective teacher to the agents assigned to him.

But what was his name? Where had he grown up, before all this? Were there still old friends, schoolteachers, relatives out there wondering what became of this child that vanished?

_Do you want to pull on this thread?_

He thinks about Bucky Barnes and the life described in his biography. Are there people out there in Indiana, telling their grandchildren about playground escapades they had with a boy who ended up in the history books? Descendants who keep a photo of him in family albums?

What does it mean, that Becca Barnes looks at this empty shell of a man masquerading as her brother and still sees Bucky? He’s not the tree that fell, but she’s hearing it all the same. So does that mean the sound is real?

Or is he slowly erasing a dead man and replacing him with a hollow substitute?

* * *

Steve feels like his entire concept of the world and reality is crumbling around him, which means it’s a great time to be called in for another mission. He lets Bucky know—or, who he thinks is Bucky, who he’s supposed to think is Bucky, whoever is playing at Bucky—who playfully shouts “don’t come back jetlagged again!” after him as he leaves. 

Does Bucky know where he’s going already, before even Steve himself does? Was it just a joke based on the few groggy days he had readjusting to a 6 hour time difference the last time he’d had a mission? When Brooks shuffles Steve onto another plane to Serbia, Steve’s doubt only strengthens, and he spends the flight simultaneously gripped by terror and exhausted by the possibilities of what Bucky said and what he meant.

When they get there in the dead of night, Steve recognizes it as the exact same warehouse he’d been at previously. Again, Steve is struck by the absurdity of guarding a warehouse full of aid supplies. There’s no reason for SHIELD to have shipped a bunch of armed soldiers out to Serbia just to guard some toilet paper. A horrifying feeling sinks into his gut suddenly; if Bucky might not actually be Bucky, then these aid supplies might not actually be aid supplies either. They might, indeed, be something that needs actual guarding.

The sheer depth of what Steve doesn’t understand threatens to drown him. How did he get so deep into a mess he can’t even comprehend?

Steve approaches the warehouse to relieve one of the two guards at the door of their shift. Their shifts are staggered; of the two guards at each position, one starts their shift two hours before the other to stand watch for a four hour shift. It results in half the guards being replaced every two hours. 

The first half of Steve’s shift passes by peacefully, which is both a blessing and a curse in disguise. On the one hand, the less that happens while guarding, the better; on the other, it leaves him plenty of time to overthink everything.

Steve is at the halfway point for his own shift when his fellow front door guard is relieved. The old guard chats with the new one briefly before they switch positions and the old guard begins to walk away.

That’s when it happens. An unintelligible yell, followed by glass breaking and a flare of light overhead. Steve whips around and sees a fire on the warehouse roof, along with the two guards posted on the roof hastily jumping off of it.

That moment of distraction is enough. The sound of gunshots fills the air, and the warehouse walls take the brunt of the hits. Steve dives for cover, crawling his way to shelter behind a parked truck nearby. He peeks around the corner, hoping to spot the gunman (gunmen?) but no luck—it’s too dark to make anyone out.

He hears his squadmates barking into their earpieces—

“Smith down—shot in the leg!”

“—missing the top of the—” 

“ —covering the entranceways! Who’s covering the doors?! Rogers, get back to your post!”

Ah, there’s Brooks. Composed as always, he sees.

“Taking cover behind a vehicle, the doors are in my sight,” he mutters in response. “No attempts made to get in yet. I’ll handle them as they come.”

Steve hears the tell-tale rapid fire of the semi-automatics the guards are armed with, so some are clearly fighting back. Not well, he imagines. The warehouse periphery is well lit, and everything else, including where their assailants must be, is pitch dark. Steve is a sitting duck right now—there’s nothing he can do but wait for something he can actually target, whether it be in front of him or by the doors he’s monitoring from a distance.

He’s in luck, though, because moments later he hears another unintelligible yell from their mystery assailants, and a group of five come rushing towards the warehouse doors. There’s still gunfire about, but they have to be steering clear of this area now, or else they risk friendly fire. Steve should be safe to move.

He bolts out from behind the vehicle and attacks. A punch to the jaw here, an elbow to the stomach there, a sweep of the legs of another, and a smack of the butt of his rifle against the head of another. The last man in the group is nearly through the warehouse doors, and Steve leaps at him, tackling him to the ground. 

This is his first close look at any of them. They’re not wearing any helmets—or, really, any protective gear. They’re not even wearing uniforms at all, just whatever black articles of clothing they could scrounge up, which makes Steve wonder who the hell it is they’re actually fighting. Certainly not an actual army.

The man he’s pinned must see Steve’s confusion in his face because he begins speaking in broken English.

“We do not want fight,” he ekes out. “Want to defend home—want to keep people safe!” The man coughs, uncomfortable under Steve’s weight. “Don’t want weapons! Please, no more weapons!” 

“What do you mean, no more weapons?” Is he asking Steve to disarm himself? The entire squad to disarm? Is he referring to the weapons his own group came with?

“New weapons—everywhere in this area! Bring too much violence. We want no more—we are here to stop more from coming in! That is all! Don’t want to fight, don’t want to hurt!”

Steve eases up on the guy, just a little. He pats him down for weapons and, after tossing aside the one pistol he finds strapped to the man’s thigh, gets off of him and gives him space. As a show of trust, he removes his own rifle and sets it aside. He doesn’t need it to do damage, anyway. He’s got four knocked-out men behind him as proof of that.

“Get out of here,” Steve says. “I won’t hurt you, but I won’t let you do anything in here either.” More news from his squadmates bursts into his ear through the earpiece. “You should leave—my team is gaining ground, and they won’t be as nice as I am. Take the chance to retreat with whoever you’ve got left.”

The man considers this for a tense moment, looking between Steve and the compatriots that lay on the ground knocked out around him. He listens for gunfire, for shouts from either his men or the SHIELD soldiers. And then—then he nods, once, decisively. 

The man takes off for the pitch black around them.

By the time his squadmates catch up to him and confirm that they’ve re-secured the warehouse, Steve returns to his post while the men who were supposed to be on next shift gather up the unconscious and wounded attackers they captured. Steve stands at guard out front of the warehouse, barely paying attention to anything but his own thoughts. What did the man mean by ‘new weapons’? What does this have to do with Steve, with this warehouse, with SHIELD?

He feels powerless under the weight of what he doesn’t understand. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I made Natasha Ukrainian because, once again, _my city now_. 
> 
> We're at the halfway point now boys! 
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["The Singularity" by Ghostemane](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjaxzZJY_xY).
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com/).


	6. Mr. Capgras Encounters a Secondhand Vanity

After that last disastrous mission and the suspicious debrief that followed, Steve is left to his own devices for a little while. Good, he thinks, because he needs time to process whatever the hell happened there and what it meant. New weapons, the man had said. Did he mean the SHIELD soldiers constantly monitoring the warehouse, armed to the gills as they were? Steve could certainly understand the locals’ wariness, but it wouldn’t motivate an attack against them. Hell, if anything, it would deter it.

Try as he might to relax, take his mind off of all the things he doesn’t understand, even just for a few moments, the man’s words keep coming back to him. When he’s taking a shower, when he’s washing the dishes, when he’s trying to focus on some random TV show he doesn’t even remember.

He’s grateful that Bucky hasn’t been home since he returned from Serbia. Something about work, again. Steve’s head is already chaotic enough right now, he doesn’t need to add his sudden doubt and confusion about Bucky to the mix on top of it.

Especially once he comes across the video. A short video filmed on someone’s cell phone, the caption claiming it was filmed at a protest in the Latverian capital of Doomstadt. As soon as Steve realizes this is happening in Latveria, he sits up straighter and taps on it to maximize it and bring up the audio.

There are hordes of people in the video, all chanting as they walk down the street with signs. Most are in Latverian, but a couple are in English, demanding things like democracy and fair elections. Several people are holding signs with a giant photo of a man’s face on it, but Steve doesn’t know who it is. His name might be Mlakar, if he’s interpreting the signs correctly.

The video moves, view of the protest shifting from the side to the very front of it. There are the loudest people, leading the march. And in the middle of the front line is the man whose face is on the signs, Mlakar. He looks oddly nervous, for someone who’s leading a movement. The protesters around him don’t seem to notice, all too busy marching and shouting into megaphones. 

Except for one. There’s a protester just behind the front line, slightly hidden but clear enough at certain angles of the video. It’s a man wearing a black beanie, bottom of his face hidden by a black scarf, holding up Mlakar’s arm as high as he can. In some brief moments of the video, it seems like he steps in even closer, almost threateningly, even though he’s doing nothing but supporting this man and his movement.

He replays the video a few more times, something heavy settling in his stomach, before pausing on a shot of the man behind the supposed Mlakar.

He zooms in, he squints, he goes back and forth looking for a clearer frame. He can’t be certain, the video quality is quite poor, but...he sees that the man in the video is wearing gloves, and there’s a small gap between the glove and sleeve of the hand holding up the leader’s arm that looks like it might be gray. Like metal. Like a metal arm.

Like the Winter Soldier’s. 

The hair color matches, too, if he’s interpreting the pixelated chunks around the edges of the hat properly. Even the arm, that tell-tale metal arm, is unclear; it might well be the crappy video quality distorting a perfectly normal flesh color. But regardless, Steve can feel it down to the chill in his bones: it’s him. 

* * *

A day after discovering that video and obsessing over it for hours, Bucky returns home from work. He finds himself watching Bucky carefully. He didn’t plan to, but now he can’t stop, analyzing his every move and every word. He’s desperate for proof that this really is his friend. Or maybe he’s looking for proof that he isn’t. Steve isn’t sure, all he knows is that he wants some certainty in either direction. Right now, he feels like he’s drowning in the roiling sea—directionless, unable to tell which way is up or down, incapable of breathing.

It’s a slow, casual day when he first does it. He’s not even sure what brings it on, but when he spots Bucky hunching over one of his books yet again, it bursts out of him.

“Hey, do you remember Camp Lehigh?”

Bucky sets the book down and raises an eyebrow. “Uh, yeah? You  _ do  _ remember that I lived there for like five years, right?”

Steve blinks rapidly. “Uh, right. Well, I was there on a mission a while back. The place is still standing, if you can believe it. Totally in disrepair, but…I figured you should know. Like you said, it was your home.”

Bucky’s expression hasn’t changed. He clearly thinks Steve is going somewhere with this. And maybe he is, because then he follows up with:

“Do you remember the first time we met?”

“Yeah, it was there,” says Bucky, his tone low like this is obvious. “I’d just come back from SAS training, and the general decided to put me to the test. I figured I must’ve passed, because next thing I knew, he was walkin’ up to me with you in tow. I didn’t even know you were there, but the second I saw you, I knew who you were. And that I was gonna be working with you.” He smirks. “You gave me the uniform that day.”

Steve’s heart unclenches. He hadn’t realized it, but this was what he was looking for when he initiated the conversation. Proof that this is Bucky, the person he shared so many years and memories with. Thank god.

* * *

And yet, Steve watches. He doesn’t know why. He feels like he’s betraying himself (not to mention Bucky) by scrutinizing his partner’s every move. He tries not to, but he can’t stop noticing things now.

Bucky always, always, always wears a shirt. He even brings a change of clothes into the bathroom with him whenever he showers, even if they get damp in the steam. Steve doesn’t remember him being anywhere near this modest before.

He cleans up after himself whenever he uses the kitchen. Which is, admittedly, nice, but he remembers Bucky moaning at length any time he was on mess kit cleanup duty when the Invaders were out in the field. He always put it off as long as possible and even tried pawning the task off onto Toro, declaring it a waste of time. Now, he does it immediately and unprompted.

He rarely initiates conversation himself these days. He’s energetic enough when spoken to, but he’s nowhere near the chatterbox Steve remembers. Then again, Bucky did always talk a lot when he was scared of something, it was his way of keeping calm. Not much to be scared of here, now.

He uses his left hand predominantly, but Steve is pretty sure Bucky was right-handed during the war, he remembers seeing Bucky throw knives on his right. Maybe he's ambidextrous? Or—wait, shit, maybe he always was left-handed, Steve can picture him throwing with his left too. Damn it, now that he’s thinking about it, he can visualize Bucky using either hand in any of his memories. He’s psyching himself out.

This is stupid. It’s obviously Bucky. He remembers the war, he knows Steve. SHIELD and their medical teams confirmed it the moment they found him in the ice. Of course it’s Bucky.

But. Shirts. And shaving. And reading books. 

Books that include Bucky’s biography.

Something cold slithers down his spine.

If there’s a detailed account of the man’s life sitting on the shelf, had Bucky answered Steve’s test from memory or memorization? 

He needs to be sure. He has to check. Surely there are things that the history books never got wind of, things that stayed on the battlefield with them and them alone.

* * *

“Hey. Do you remember your 18th birthday?”

“Hmm. Which one was that?”

“...It was. You know. 1943. We were laying low in Poland—”

“—and Toro...Toro got the lady of the house to bake me a cake, right? But she reported us, and instead of a cake, my birthday present that year was an ambush attack from the Super-Axis. How could I  _ forget _ ? Toro gave up our cover to throw me a party—what a gift!” 

* * *

“Our last Christmas in the war was pretty good, wasn’t it, Buck?”

“Sure it was. Once you got the stick out of your ass long enough to join us at the party.”

“Well—”

“Good thing you did, too, if it wasn’t for your help I never would’ve managed to get Toro and that girl of his over themselves long enough to have that date.” 

* * *

“Well, look at that—looks like we made it to our first 4th of July in the future. What do you think, am I turning 25 or 90?”

“Don’t give me that, Cap, we both know the 4th of July isn’t really your birthday! You’re a damn September baby.”

* * *

“You know, I just realized, Buck—that movie we saw last week? There wasn’t a single newsreel in there. Just ads for other movies. I guess with TV and the internet and all, they don’t really need to put ‘em in the movies anymore.”

“Huh. Well...good riddance! I hated those damn things—they always made me look like some dumb starstruck kid who’d be hopeless without you. Then everyone’d get mad at  _ me  _ for calling them out! What a load of crock.” 

“...Yeah. Yeah, I guess you did.”

* * *

Rogers is in a very reminiscent mood lately. Or more accurately, suspicious. He’s not sure when it started, but he only noticed it when Rogers began pretending to dwell on the past in order to test his memories. But for it to have become so blatant, he must have missed earlier stages of suspicion, and in his ignorance only given Rogers more reason to suspect him. Shit.

It was probably after the visit to Becca. He’s been all out of sorts since they returned from that.

Still, though, he’s holding up just fine under Rogers’ poorly-disguised interrogation. He has the answer to each of his questions ready and is able to couch it in just enough Bucky cockiness to pass it off as casual and real. The upside to his fugue after Indiana is that he’s apparently spent so much time poring over Bucky’s biography that he’s fully memorized it.

At least, that’s what he thought. It’s the dead of night and he’s locked himself in the bathroom with the Bucky biography to study it in more depth, combing it for further details he might need to memorize for Rogers’s future questioning. But, he frowns, it appears that there’s gaps in the book. He’d swear that pages, or perhaps even entire chapters, had been ripped out, but he can see perfectly well from the spine that all the pages are, indeed, there.

What had happened to those chunks, then? This is the most comprehensive biography on Bucky Barnes ever compiled. Damn near everything about the man and his companionship with Rogers has to be in here. So, he thinks as he flips furiously from front to back, why—why the hell are there pieces missing all of a sudden? 

The book mentions Bucky’s last Christmas, spent at a party in London in 1944, but nothing about Toro and his date. There’s no mention of Bucky’s opinions on newsreels anywhere. Nowhere does it say that Captain America’s birthday is in September.

In fact, over the next few days, he crosschecks with all his other sources. All the other books, reliable online archives, documentaries he desperately digs up, they all say the same thing: Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America, was born on July 4th, 1922. 

So where the hell had the soldier gotten September from? And why had Rogers grinned like it was a secret between them and not a blatant error?

He takes the Bucky biography back into the bathroom with him on another late night and stares at the photo of the man on the cover. He drags his fingers down it gently, almost reverently, as if he’ll be able to touch his flesh through the book jacket. And then he looks up into the mirror above the sink.

It’s not quite the same. The man on the book’s cover is younger than the soldier, without a doubt, but there’s something there. It’s in the curly-wavy hair barely coaxed into neatness. The slope of the nose. The dimples that appear next to a smirk. He thinks that, if the photo were in color, the eyes would be a familiar shade of brown. Behind the veneer of age, the face in the mirror and the face on the book are...undeniably similar.

The soldier thinks about fallen trees and pulling on threads, about the concept of “before”, and feels his stomach sink into an icy pit.

* * *

Yet another meeting with Pierce, and they do the same old song and dance once again. The soldier stands at attention and waits for Pierce to insist he take a seat before he lowers himself. Pierce takes a long, purposeful sip from his glass. The soldier isn’t sure what it is—whiskey, perhaps? It doesn’t matter. All he can do is wait until Pierce decides he wants to continue. 

“So,” Pierce finally says, setting the glass down on his desk. “Any issues with our friend lately?”

The soldier’s back, ramrod straight. “No, sir.”

“Is that so? Fascinating.” His voice is light, almost jovial. He drags the glass around the desk and shuffles some papers as if he is reorganizing. The soldier knows this game, but has little patience for it. “I hear he’s asking a lot of questions about old times.”

Ah, of course. There it is. If the soldier had noticed Rogers’s suspicion, then Pierce and his bugs would have picked it up as well. The soldier’s mouth goes dry and he swallows before he meticulously chooses his words, projecting an air of professional nonchalance.

“He’s just...reminiscent. Wistful for the good old days. As long as I indulge him, he will stay complacent and none the wiser.”

“Hmm.” Pierce’s tone is much less cheerful now, low in its skepticism. He watches the soldier carefully, pulling him into a staring contest that he doesn’t understand the purpose of. Whatever Pierce is looking for, though, he must be satisfied, because he leans back in his chair and waves his hand casually. “Continue as you were, then, soldier.”

* * *

Steve knows he won’t get any answers from his CO or the rest of his squad. They’ve already repeatedly rebuffed all his questions, treating him as though their modern work is beyond his simpleton 1940s brain. He’d tried to get answers from Bucky, who had an in on the administrative side of things, but he’s not sure how truthful Bucky was being with him. If he’s ever been truthful. If he’s even— 

No. Not now. He can’t fall into this spiral of doubt again.

All he knows is, the only information he can rely on is what he finds himself.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t know much about gathering intelligence, especially not now in a world so reliant on new technologies. He settles for going to the SHIELD offices, telling Bucky he has work, and wandering the administrative departments idly to see if he can pick up any chatter or gossip that might give him a lead. 

It’s not a great plan, but it’s the best he’s got.

He does this for a few hours a day, three days in a row. Two hours in on the third day, though, he finds the Black Widow. Or rather, she finds him. Steve has just been standing in front of the vending machine pretending to be indecisive for half an hour.

“Funny running into you here, of all places,” she says, sidling up to the second vending machine next to him.

“Uh, hi,” he says, dumbly.

“So what brings you all the way down to the admin department?” Black Widow feeds the machine a dollar and then punches one of the buttons. A can of soda noisily tumbles down.

“I could ask the same of you.”

“Yeah, but I asked first.” She pops the can of soda open and takes a sip. Well, he can’t argue with that.

“Mmm,” he hums. “Just curious.”

“About?”

“The whole situation with Latveria.”

“Anything in particular about it?”

“I just—I feel like I’m missing something with it. I keep hearing SHIELD’s got nothing to do with it, but I’m not so sure about that.”

“And what’s fueling this little hunch of yours, exactly, Cap?” she asks, lowering her voice just a bit. She takes another sip of soda.

Steve hesitates, because he doesn’t know much about Black Widow. She works for SHIELD, and that should, in theory, make her trustworthy to discuss this with. But Brooks is SHIELD too. So is Bucky, whoever he is. That isn’t enough to trust someone anymore. 

But she did honestly answer his questions about the Winter Soldier. She was willing to give him something, which is more than anyone else around him, it seems.

He responds slowly, hesitantly, his voice lowering to match hers.

“The first I heard about it, the diplomat who got killed. When it happened, Fury ran past me rambling about the Winter Soldier causing an international incident. I’ve had missions along the Serbian-Latverian border. And last week, the, the protest—I could’ve sworn I saw the Winter Soldier there. Something’s going on. I just—I can’t put my finger on it.”

She hums, lips pursed together tightly. Then, “And what makes you think you’ll find something here, in the admin breakroom? I’m sure you know at least one person who you could ask directly.”

Steve grimaces. “I’m...not sure he’s being totally honest with me.”

“Is that so.” It’s not a question.

“So. I’m trying to see what I can dig up on my own.”

She hums again and takes another drink of her soda. “Count me in.”

“What?”

“You’re no good at gathering intel anyway, I might as well. I’ll let you know once I’ve found something. Here.” She pulls out a tiny notebook from one of her pockets, scribbles down a phone number, then rips out the slip of paper to hand to Steve. “In case you need me.” 

* * *

The soldier pulls on the thread. When he’d fallen apart in front of Natasha, his fears and his curiosity about who he might have once been came from a place of almost hypothetical concern. He’d stood on the precipice, staring into the pit below and wondering what lay at the bottom, but hadn’t taken the plunge. It’s so much easier to ask ‘what ifs’ when you’re on solid ground.

He isn’t anymore. He’s falling aimlessly through the dark with no sense of up or down, and what was once fearful curiosity has become a chilling possibility.

He may have very well once been a person. 

He can almost admit to himself that he’s terrified by what this means. Why doesn’t he remember that period of his life? How did he become the Winter Soldier? Why is he doing the work that he’s doing?

So he begins digging.

First, he has to find a sysadmin with enough skeletons in their closet that they could be blackmailed into betraying infosec at one of the world’s foremost intelligence agencies. A tall task in and of itself, given the rigor of SHIELD’s background checks, but all it takes is one weak link. Besides, this is still easier and less suspicious than the soldier trying to access any files on himself, which are certainly more secure and more monitored than any other personnel records.

It doesn’t take long. Mariette Wilson, junior sysadmin hired two years ago. While her background comes up completely clean, he discovers that her boyfriend, Thomas Vargas, has a visa that expired three months ago. From there, it’s child’s play to corner her on her way home from work one night and threaten a little deportation to get her to cave to his demands.

She reports back that she doesn’t have a high enough clearance to access the Winter Soldier files or even, strangely, the Bucky Barnes ones. But, she says, she can access old server backups which may have older copies of the files. A day later, she presses a USB drive into his hands that contains everything she could find matching those keywords. He gives her a curt nod and vanishes, certain that she won’t report any of this for fear of her boyfriend’s or her own safety.

That night, he waits until Rogers is asleep before creeping out of the bedroom and pulling out his work-issued tablet. He plugs the USB drive and braces himself for whatever it may contain.

At a glance, it is a collection of mission reports and a couple of doctor’s evaluations. But then he catches sight of one file labelled as an incident report. Curiosity possesses him and he clicks on that one first.

The incident in question appears to be his failure to return to handlers after a 1973 mission, his first in the United States. After killing a senator in Dallas, he apparently vanished as he traveled across the country. It took two weeks for other Red Room agents to find him in New York City and bring him back in.

_ Even after subsequent mental conditioning, Codename: Winter Soldier has no answers for his conduct, or any memory of his time outside our control. While troubling, the incident appears to be an aberration, requiring nothing more than closer watch. It is further recommended that in the future he be excluded from missions on American soil. _

Something about that makes him nauseous. It’s not just that he has no recollection of this—spotty memories have always been a feature of his life, it’s a known side effect of his resets, or, he thinks, what this report calls  _ mental conditioning _ . No, what bothers him are the circumstances.

The soldier had always thought that the resets happened because he was naturally impulsive; highly trained, but prone to outbursts that threatened to jeopardize not just himself or the mission at hand, but the Red Room as a whole. It was a necessary evil he endured (or, perhaps, convinced himself to endure) because it made him operate at peak efficiency.

And yes, not reporting back after a mission could be very dangerous, but nothing of the sort had happened. The soldier doesn’t know what he did in 1973 or why, but he clearly wasn’t out to jeopardize his employers or the mission, which he completed flawlessly. In fact, it almost sounded like he was looking for something, some kind of personal quest.

The concept of the soldier having any sort of personal anything is bizarre to him.

But, he realizes, this means that he was not reset because he endangered anything or anyone. No, he was reset because he acted on his own desires. The soldier had wanted something for himself, and subsequently had it forcibly excised from his mind. This means that, despite what he thought for all these years, he isn’t actually loyal to a fault, he isn’t working towards the same goals as his superiors, he isn’t sacrificing a normal life for some greater good.

He’s been forced into this position. Whoever the soldier had once been, he was not here of his own volition. How many of his actions, words, thoughts had ever been his own? Are currently his own? Were those two weeks in 1973 the only time he’d ever acted on his own free will?

The soldier closes the file and lays on the couch until the sickness passes. He can’t stomach any more gruesome information that might be there.

All he knows now is that he can’t let himself be reset ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The thing about memory is, it's fallible.
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["Mr. Capgras Encounters a Secondhand Vanity" by Will Wood and The Tapeworms](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poF239sG_oU). Or as I like to think of it, "bucky barnes's identity crisis, but make it manic."
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com/).


	7. From The Growth Underneath The Closed Mouth

This job is a little unusual, compared to how he typically works. But then again, he’s been doing a lot of unusual work lately.

Today’s target is less prominent than normal, and his goal this time is not to keep hidden or make it look like an accident, but rather to put on a show for the security cameras.

Not unlike what he’s been doing with Rogers. He’s gotten a lot of practice with acting lately.

So he tracks down the schedule of the Director of the Capital Guard, the man heading von Doom’s personal security detail, and looks for occasions where he’ll be alone, but within sight of security cameras. It takes a few days of careful observation, but he follows the man at a distance as he heads out for a “private appointment.” The director leaves headquarters and travels halfway across the city to a seedy hotel. Bingo. He’s likely having an affair, but all that matters is the perfect opportunity it presents to the soldier.

While the director is having his “private appointment”, the soldier scopes out the exterior of the hotel for security cameras. There’s one watching the main entrance, of course, and one at the back door. But the back door appears to be employees-only, and the director’s car is parked closer to the front, so it’s a simple matter of staking out the main entrance.

The thing with any assassination is that it mostly just involves waiting. Waiting to get access to buildings or information. Waiting for the perfect weather or traffic patterns. Waiting for the target to get into a good position. So the soldier leans back in his rented car and lets his mind drift while he waits.

Here he is, killing yet another person at the beck and call of his superiors. The soldier doesn’t even really care who the target is, not anymore. Not since years ago when he believed his trainers, bought into their rhetoric about building a better world through dirty work. Maybe not even then—it never mattered what the victims did to paint a target on their backs, only that the Red Room determined they were better off dead. And why would it matter, the soldier thinks. It’s not like he has any choice in who he kills or didn’t kill, so why bother with such irrelevant information. It didn’t bother him before, but now—now, knowing that his own thoughts and desires are so carefully stamped out, the lack of information feels like just another way to make him a puppet. Like putting blinders on a horse, only letting him see what they want him to. 

Three hours later, there’s finally movement. The front door opens and the director is walking out. His crisis can wait—the soldier swiftly exits the car and runs over, making sure to be in clear view of both the director and the security camera. 

The soldier rushes forth and the director freezes, then scrambles in place. He socks the director in the jaw, sending him falling to the ground. While he’s down, the soldier smoothly pulls out a pistol.

And so, the man dressed in the unofficial uniform of the Doomstadt protesters kills the security director of the nation’s leader on camera.

As he leaves, he feels nothing. This is a simple kill, and while the circumstances were a little different, the methods and result are perfectly routine. He did it because he was told to, because it’s all he’s good for. How many dozens of people had died at the hands of a man who didn’t even care?

By the time the soldier is on the flight back to New York, that feeling has morphed into nausea.

* * *

When Natasha goes to her locker that day, she finds a slip of paper demanding she go to the bar that very same night. Normally, the short notice would rankle her, but she can’t help but wonder what’s so urgent that it requires her immediate attention.

When she arrives, the soldier is already there, and has already had a pint or two. She slides into the booth and raises a curious eyebrow at him, but he doesn’t appear to notice. He is unusually anxious, averting his eyes and wringing his hands and tapping his foot incessantly as he sits before her. He’s looking down as he forms his words, slow and careful.

“Do you ever...think about why—why we do the,” he swallows, “the work that we do?” 

The question stuns Natasha into silence. This is not something she thought the Winter Soldier would ever discuss.

“Hmm.” She taps her chin. “In what sense?”

The soldier sucks in air through his teeth, as if this is almost painful.

“I mean...they tell us who to kill, who to track. And then we do it. But why?” He finally looks up at Natasha, but doesn’t quite manage eye contact. “Why did you do it? Any of it?”

She stares down at her hands spread on the table. This isn’t something she has an easy answer for. She imagines no one in her position would.

“Many reasons, I suppose. Maybe I believed everything they told us and that it was for the good of the world. Maybe because I had nowhere else to go. Maybe because I didn’t have a choice.” She shakes her head. “I don’t have an easy answer for you.”

His gaze is directed firmly on the table again, lips thinned out into a grimace as he nods. More silence, then:

“Did you want to do it?”

“I thought I did, at the time.”

The soldier’s brow furrows in confusion. “What does  _ that  _ mean, you  _ thought  _ you did?”

Natasha sighs. “It’s...something I struggle with, even now. It never really goes away, wondering how much of my work back then was my choice or not. Even if I carried out those actions, those kills, how much does it matter that I was coerced?”

“Coerced?” The soldier rasps. She nods.

“And how much does it matter that I thought I wasn’t, and I was doing everything because I wanted to?”

“How...how did you realize you weren’t?” His voice is thin and reedy.

She grins, ever so slightly. “Someone showed me what it meant to make your own decisions, what the difference is between  _ want  _ and  _ must _ . And once I understood that...I realized that I was only following those orders because if I didn’t, I’d be punished, or I’d lose something important.” She almost laughs at how lost the soldier looks, trying to process all this. “It sounds a lot easier than it actually was.”

Then she thinks about exactly what it is he’s asking and why. Something cold slithers down Natasha’s back.

Does he...not want to be doing whatever work he’s doing?

To her, it had always seemed like everything he did was voluntary. He’d wanted to protect the Soviet Union and make it stronger. He’d wanted to execute those who would bring harm to them. He’d wanted to get his hands dirty in service of a better world.

Of course, these days she now thought of those lofty ideals as propaganda. But the soldier never seemed to think that way himself. He’d bought into it, or at least accepted it enough to carry out such dangerous work. This level of doubt...was he no longer a willing participant?

Had he ever been?

She thinks of how the Red Room warped her memories to make her loyal to them. Her own opinions never mattered, because they’d wiped them out and planted in her what they wanted instead. The soldier’s total amnesia is different, but...without that context, without a life full of experiences to inform one’s thoughts and beliefs...could it be said that he’d done  _ anything  _ willingly?

Looking at this conflicted man before her, she can only think  _ no _ .

“Zimka. I could help you,” she blurts out before she can think her words over. “I could help you leave. Start over. I managed it. So can you.”

The soldier finally snaps out of his distress and gives her a look that is at once pitying, weary, and smug. She hates it, the way he looks like he knows more than her and both relishes and despises it.

“No,” he says, “you didn’t. And neither can I.”

Before she can even process his words, he stands up and leaves her alone in the bar.

* * *

“Sir,” the soldier stands at attention.

“Yes, what is it, soldier?” asks Pierce irritably, waving his hand for the soldier to relax.

It is, after all, a rarity for the soldier to be the one requesting time from Pierce, rather than the other way around. That in itself will make this discussion tricky. He sits gingerly in the chair across from Pierce’s desk, ramrod straight.

“I have a request. A suggestion, of sorts.”

Pierce raises an eyebrow. “Go on.”

The soldier steels himself as he takes a breath. “I believe I should be removed from any further missions taking place in Latveria.” He waits for a response, but Pierce merely blinks, beckoning him to justify himself. That’s as good as he can hope for, he supposes. “The Latverian situation has progressed enough that it is self-sustaining, or can continue without my input. I believe it’s more important to focus on Captain America. He is growing more...curious, and my prolonged absences only add to it. It would be best to keep a closer eye on him so that I can satisfy his curiosities and dispel his doubts before they’re allowed to grow.”

A horrible silence follows his speech. Pierce is still as a statue, his eyebrows knit together in contemplation at best and fury at worst. The soldier thinks, for a moment, that he has overstepped his bounds, expressed too much of an opinion, that they’ll reset him again like they did in 1973, and his breath hitches.

Then, at long long last, Pierce blinks and leans back in his chair.

“Very well. You are, after all, the one on the ground. I will cancel your Latverian missions and you will be put on Rogers’s detail full time. Is that all, soldier?”

The soldier nods numbly and takes this as his cue to leave, before Pierce’s good mood runs out.

* * *

“Keep an eye on him.”

“Sir?”

“Our asset here may have developed some ulterior motives of his own. Monitor his words and actions as you already do Rogers’s. He is in a very precarious position, and if we don’t keep track of it, soon we will be as well.”

* * *

_ Meet me at the Sunrise Cafe at 2000.  _

Steve stares at the text message. It’s from Black Widow, and although he added the phone number she gave him to his contacts, he never gave her his number in return. Although, he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised that she found it anyway. Finding information was a specialty of hers, and she must have found something to demand a meeting with him.

So he puts on some workout clothes, calls out to Bucky that he’s going for a run as he leaves, and makes his way over to the cafe. Once he gets there, he spots Black Widow sitting at a table with a laptop and a cup of coffee, hair pinned up with glasses perched on her nose. He takes a seat on the other end of the little table.

“So,” he says, fidgeting awkwardly. “What’s this about?”

“Your hunch about Latveria was right.”

Steve is shocked into silence as Black Widow turns the laptop around so the screen is visible to him. On it is an article from a Serbian news site. He can’t read a damn thing, but there’s photos. The only one visible on the screen right now is of a seedy hotel.

Before he can ask what this is, Black Widow explains.

“The Director of the Capital Guard of Latveria was killed by a protester. Forensics declared the bullet to have striations matching the rifling of the Glock 19, same as SHIELD standard issue to field agents.” Then she clicks on another window, showing another Serbian article, this time showing a group of protesters on the street, but this time, they’re carrying weapons along with signs. “The director’s death was a catalyst—there is now a grassroots movement growing around the protests. They want to dismantle the absolute monarchy in favor of democracy, rallying around a man named Vitomir Mlakar. Notice anything familiar?”

Steve does, but it takes him a few moments to grasp at what it is. It’s the weapons, he realizes as his blood runs cold. They’re exactly the same as what he’s always been issued on missions. Dozens of them visible in the photo, and surely dozens if not hundreds more in the crowd that he can’t see.

“So the—the aid supplies we’ve been moving and guarding...this whole time, they were weapons?” he whispers in horror. Black Widow nods.

“And riot gear and other supplies, yes. It’s most likely.”

“And the protester—they used a SHIELD weapon as well, right?”

She nods again.

“There’s a good chance that SHIELD is involved somehow with both the director’s death and the following movement.”

Suddenly, Steve is reminded of that cell phone footage with the protester who looked suspiciously familiar.

“So...SHIELD is connected to the Latveria unrest, which is connected to the Winter Soldier.”

“Seems like it,” Black Widow confirms grimly. Steve’s head is spinning.

“But—but  _ why _ ?” 

She sighs.

“That, unfortunately, is still up in the air. We’ll have to keep digging. But  _ be careful. _ ” She looks him dead in the eye. “The closer we get to this, the more danger we’re in.” 

Steve nods.

“Now. I’m assuming you told your roommate something before you left.”

“Yes, I said that I was going out for a run.”

Black Widow nods. “Make sure you run home, then. Build up a sweat.”

Steve nods grimly. Lying to his best friend about where he’s been and then actively working to solidify the lie makes him feel dirty—and so does trying to justify it by telling himself it’s not even Bucky, it’s just an impostor. But whatever SHIELD is up to, whatever strange conspiracy is afoot, whatever is the cause of Bucky’s strange behavior makes him feel much dirtier.

* * *

Steve takes a roundabout route home both to give him time to actually look like he’s exercising, and to give him time to think.

He doesn’t know what to do next. He sure as hell isn’t going to keep working on SHIELD missions tied to assassinations and some strange societal upheaval he doesn’t understand, and he sure as hell isn’t going to stand for continuing to be a pawn in someone’s political games. But what then? Where does he go, what does he do? His salary, his apartment are all paid for by SHIELD; if he leaves, his entire life as he knows it right now goes with it. He’s not afraid to sacrifice that, but he doesn’t know what he would do afterwards.

Not to mention the omnipresent question of Bucky—the reason he’s running right now in the first place. Bucky’s almost certainly lying to him, and now he’s returned the favor in kind with this “running” excuse. He wishes he could trust him. Bucky’s been his closest companion and partner for years. There was a time when they were so in sync, they barely even had to talk. There were no secrets between them. Now it feels like that’s all there is.

If he asks directly, Bucky will almost certainly say he doesn’t know what’s going on in Latveria and that SHIELD has no involvement. And, the way Nat advised caution, he wonders if asking directly will result in some kind of repercussions.

So he’ll dance around the topic, he decides. Play dumb to SHIELD’s involvement and see if he can find anything else.

He returns from his run appropriately sweaty. Bucky is on the couch, reading his biography again, something that strikes him as much heavier and more sinister than before. But he ignores that in favor of taking a shower before returning to the living room and leaning casually against the back of the couch.

“So. You seen any of the news on Latveria lately, Buck?” he asks, lightly. Bucky looks up from the book, setting it face down, and shrugs.

“I heard about it. What’s on your mind?”

Steve shrugs himself, trying to make it look casual. “I was just thinking it’s a shame we aren’t doing anything there. I don’t fully know all the details, but any time there’s that much going on in one place in such a short time, it means they need help. If only for civilians to keep safe.”

Bucky doesn’t respond, perhaps expecting more. Well, he’s at least Bucky enough to be right about that.

“Maybe I should go to Fury myself, ask if there’s anything we can do to help. I’m sure SHIELD’s got plenty of resources that could do something,” Steve fishes.

Another moment, and then Bucky grins, carefree and lopsided. “Yeah, that figures. Always the good samaritan, huh? Always looking for some way to help. It’s a pain in the ass sometimes, you know that?”

It rolls off his tongue so casually Steve almost forgets that he isn’t even sure if this is really Bucky. But he’s swiftly reminded when Bucky starts shaking his head.

“Not a good idea, though,” Bucky says, crossing his arms as he leans back against the arm of the couch. “They won’t listen to a word you have to say and will just brush you off. They’re not gonna want to be bothered by trivial nonsense—what they think is trivial nonsense,” he corrects himself when Steve opens his mouth to object, “when they’re busy prepping Project Insight.”

“Project Insight? What’s Project Insight? I haven’t heard anything about it.”

Bucky’s eyes immediately widen and Steve can practically hear the ‘oh shit’ he doesn’t say. Apparently, this is something that Bucky the admin assistant has clearance to know that Steve the field agent doesn’t. Then, strangely, Bucky relaxes again, as if nothing happened.

“It’s uh, it’s nothing. Don’t worry about it, it’s just. Something small, but a bureaucratic planning nightmare. Everyone’s stressed over it. That’s all.”

And then he walks briskly out of the living room and into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. He does not come out for the rest of the evening, and by the time Steve retreats to bed that night, Bucky has already fallen asleep before him.

When he wakes the next morning, Bucky is already gone. Left for work, probably. Once Steve is up and ready for the day, he checks his phone to find a message from Bucky.

_ Something came up at work. All hands on deck. Not gonna make it home tonight, maybe not for a while. Don’t wait up. _

More strange, though, is the note left sitting on Bucky’s bed, all hospital corners, neater than it’s been since they moved in. Steve picks up the note, but can’t quite make sense of it.

It shows a rough triangle. At each point, there is a word listed: PIERCE, MLAKAR, INSIGHT.

He has no idea what it means. But it feels important. It feels like something Black Widow should know about. He texts her to let her know, and an hour later, they meet in another cafe, where he lays the note flat on the table between them.

She scrutinizes it a moment, then looks up at Steve.

“And he left this on the bed before leaving for work?”

“Yeah.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Well, last night, he let slip that there’s some big project called Insight going on that’s apparently going to have everyone really busy, but it was an accident. He tried telling me it was nothing. Then this morning, he sent me a message telling me not to expect him back for ‘a while’.” He holds out his phone to show the text message.

She tenses and her face hardens. She grabs the phone out of his hand and turns it off.

“We need to leave immediately.”

“Wait, what?” Steve sputters.

“It’s not safe. I don’t know what this project is, but if he mentioned it accidentally and then vanished right after, he knows he’s fucked up. Your apartment’s bugged too, so whoever he’s working for already knows. He’s going to go to ground, and they’re going to try to clean up the mess—meaning  _ you _ .

“Go back to your apartment immediately, don’t say anything while you’re there. Pack whatever you need, then meet me back here as soon as you’re done. Leave your phone in the apartment. Dress inconspicuously. We’ll go from there. Do you understand me?” 

The urgency in Black Widow’s tone shocks him—she’s so unflappable, he couldn’t imagine what would get her like this. And now he’s in the middle of it. He’s shocked into unintelligible stammering, not even sure where to begin asking questions. 

Then she leans in close and says, in a low tone:

“As of now, we are officially on the run.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gently presses down on the gas pedal
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["Mask" by Bauhaus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imnmhZaA3QI).
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com/).


	8. But I Believe We're The Enemy

Steve and Natasha (she insisted he know her actual name if they were going to go on the run together) meet back up at the coffee shop a few hours later with hastily packed duffel bags and wearing baseball hats. Natasha hands him a spare pair of sunglasses wordlessly.

She leads him away from the shop to the train station, her movements so brisk and efficient Steve can’t find time to get a word in edgewise. He almost feels as powerless right now as he did while working those missions for SHIELD with barely a clue what he was doing. The only difference now is that he trusts Natasha, knows that they are both on the same page of uncovering some suspicious plot, and it makes all the difference. He may feel helpless, but at least there isn’t a yawning pit in his gut.

She pays for one set of train tickets to Chicago by credit card. Then she goes to another clerk and buys a second set of train tickets to Washington DC in cash. Then they leave the train station entirely and walk a few blocks north to the bus station, where they pick a route at random and pay for a third set of tickets, again in cash.

They sit back to back with each other on the dirty floor of the bus station, waiting for their bus to arrive. They step off the uncomfortable coach bus an hour later, somewhere in suburban New Jersey, where Natasha hotwires a car and drives them further through the dense neighborhoods until they reach a town full of decaying apartment buildings and factories with windows painted over in white.

She parks outside one of the abandoned factories and leads Steve inside. Only then does she finally open a conversation.

“So. You have questions. Let’s talk,” she says.

“What? Why now, suddenly?” he asks.

“We’re alone, hiding somewhere no one will think to look for us,” she shrugs. “Plus, we’re done traveling, at least for now. I wanted to save the talk for when you wouldn’t need to focus on much else.”

He has a lot of questions.  _ Why did we need to run? Why the urgency? Why all the precautions just based on Bucky uttering a single word? How did you know all this so immediately?  _ But as he thinks back to what she told him yesterday, right before they scrambled to leave New York, there’s one specific detail he wants to know about, that bothers him more than anything else.

“What did you mean, when you said ‘whoever Bucky is working for’?”

“Straight for the hardest question, huh.” She sighs. “What you need to know is, the man you’ve been living with is not Bucky Barnes.”

The words hit Steve like a punch to the gut.

“That was the Winter Soldier, sent to infiltrate SHIELD and impersonate your friend. I haven’t been able to find who exactly he’s working for or what he’s trying to do, but he is not a free agent. He’s working for  _ someone _ , and he crossed a line by giving you information you’re not meant to know, which makes  _ you  _ a target.”

It makes a horrible kind of sense. Steve had spent weeks feeling something was out of place, but having it confirmed is something else. He feels used. He feels like a fool. He let this stranger swindle him, lull him into an intimacy of sharing his every thought and feeling with him. He shared his childhood home with a stranger. Hell, he took this stranger to visit his best friend’s long-lost dying sister.

Like so many months ago, Steve Rogers once again thinks this might be a very creative corner of hell.

“I,” Steve croaks, “I was starting to think he might be an impostor.” But suspecting is one thing, and having it confirmed is a horrifying nightmare all its own.

Natasha nods, but Steve can’t see it, because he’s hunched over and buried his face in his hands. It takes all his effort to keep from trembling.

“How...how long have you known?” he whispers.

“Since the day I saw him.” Then, more quietly, “I’ve known him since the Red Room. We...worked together.”

With every word, it gets worse. With every word, Steve feels another arrow pierce him through the chest.

“And you just  _ let  _ me live with this—this assassin stranger for months?! You let me think he was my friend?!” he hisses furiously. Natasha’s face only hardens. For a horrible, cruel moment, Steve wonders if she ever feels any emotion at all.

“I wanted to investigate and see what he was up to before I said anything I couldn’t take back.” And then her face softens again. “I never did find out, but he seemed...reluctant. I don’t think he wanted to be doing any of it.”

Steve scoffs, a terrible sound somewhere between laughter, crying, and a trembling hiccup. Great. What consolation is he supposed to find in knowing that the assassin who’s been impersonating his best friend for months didn’t want to? 

Bucky is dead. Bucky is really, truly dead. He died falling off that rocket because of Steve’s carelessness, and he will never be coming back. He will never get to see Becca again. He will never get to tease Steve for being a city boy again. He’s gone, it’s all Steve’s fault, and he’s being punished for it by Bucky’s likeness being paraded around by a stranger like a cruel joke.

Steve remembers in that moment that, as he was packing his bag to go on the run, he noticed that the Bucky biography was gone from the shelf, and so was the box of Becca’s letters that lived in the nightstand’s drawer. To twist the knife, the Winter Soldier had run off with Bucky’s own personal effects; things that belonged with him in his grave, not stolen by an impostor.

Steve feels sick and spends the rest of the day (and evening, and night) curled up against the cold, dusty brick wall of the factory with his face buried in his knees, trying to stay silent as he sobs.

Natasha was right. It  _ was  _ best to have hidden this until he had nothing else to focus on. He knows he won’t be able to think about anything else. 

* * *

Natasha changes her clothes and slips out of the factory. They’re going to need groceries and bedding if they’re going to be here a while, and she suspects that they will. That, and she can’t be around Steve right now. She knows he’s hurting, she knows that what he said hurt him. But she can’t shoulder his pain right now, not when she’s dealing with her own.

She feels like an idiot. She thought for so long that she was free now, that she made her own informed choices and worked on missions that would help people, that would maybe in some small part atone for all the blood she spilled before. She had felt like a new woman when she struck up that partnership with Fury and joined SHIELD. Like for the first time in her life, she was discovering who she really was, and realizing that that person was someone who would help others...made her feel good.

But apparently, SHIELD has been manufacturing unrest in Latveria for months now. Several politicians dead, and who knows how many more innocent civilians hurt, killed, or arrested. And that was just what she could uncover in the past few months—what else could SHIELD have possibly done under the radar? Is currently doing under the radar? What other atrocities could Natasha have been facilitating this entire time while foolishly deluding herself into thinking she was doing the right thing?

Was Fury aware of what SHIELD was doing? Had he been playing her for a fool this whole time, taking advantage of her skills and her naive desire to turn a new leaf? Fury runs a tight ship, she can’t imagine any operation happening without his knowledge and agreement.

Maybe she never even knew Fury at all. He liked to play things close to the vest as much as she did. Maybe they never knew each other. Maybe they’d only used each other for selfish motives; one to further whatever plans he had for the world stage, the other to delude herself into thinking she could ever bring good into the world.

She thinks of her last conversation with the Winter Soldier, when she’d offered to help him escape just as she had.

_ “No, you didn’t. And neither can I,” _ he’d said.

He’d known. He’d known that she was being played. That they were both still nothing but pawns for power-hungry men, inflicting whatever pain they desired for their own agendas.

Maybe this is just how it’s meant to be. Natasha was created to be the Black Widow, a tool to spy and kill at a master’s beck and call. Of course she still would be, she’d never known anything else. How could she ever know freedom, when she’d never experienced it? This is what she was made for, and she’ll never be good for anything else.

No.

Natasha blinks away tears rapidly as she enters the grocery store. She can’t let herself fall into this trap. 

So she’d made a mistake. So she’d fucked up and hurt people. That’s nothing new. All it means is she has to try again, fix the mess she made. That’s why she’s here now, with Steve. She’s going to get a week’s worth of food for them, and then they’re going to sit down and figure out what to do next.

She’s the Black fucking Widow. She’s good at making the impossible happen.

* * *

As soon as the soldier had let slip Project Insight’s name, he began plotting his escape. There was no way SHIELD or Pierce would let an error of that magnitude go—they would probably want to reset him again. The thought of returning to empty obedience after having had a taste of identity, of history, of being a person—he can’t do it. He doesn’t want another 1973 escape attempt rattling around somewhere in his mind, locked away and inaccessible aside from incident reports written by his captors. He wants to keep this. He  _ earned  _ this. 

So he pretends everything is fine for the purposes of not giving away his escape so obviously to Pierce’s bugs in the apartment. He pretends to sleep and, once Rogers is asleep himself, he crawls back out of bed and packs a bag. He doesn’t need much; a hat to hide his face and hair, a few outfits, his arm cover, and gloves. But most importantly, he takes the few puzzle pieces to himself that he has: Bucky’s biography, the box of Becca’s letters, and the USB drive containing the Winter Soldier files. He packs them reverently into his bag, scribbles out a note, swipes some cash, and slips out of the apartment silently.

He takes the first bus out of New York, not caring where it takes him. He ends up in Pennsylvania. There, he switches buses and heads to Kentucky. He travels by all hours of the day, and rereads Bucky’s biography with a renewed vigor either by daylight or by the rhythm of passing streetlights in the night. He can almost imagine the events described in the book, can almost see them and hear them and smell them. He wonders if what he’s envisioning is real, from memories buried for decades, or just an impression cobbled together from imagined shards. He has no way of knowing either way.

Sometimes, he has to close the book and cover his eyes while he weeps.

In Kentucky, he decides he’s been too easy to follow. He’s paid for everything in cash and moved as quickly and randomly as he could, but at the end of the day, bus routes are easily mapped and there are cameras at each bus station. So for the next leg of his journey, he sneaks out of the terminal to the bus depot, where vehicles wait to be directed to gates for boarding. He sneaks into the luggage compartment of a random bus and rides cramped between suitcases and bikes until he can’t handle the heat and close quarters anymore. 

That’s how the Winter Soldier finds himself in Indianapolis.

He almost laughs at the cruel irony of it. By complete accident, he finds himself in Bucky Barnes’s home state. (He finds himself in his own home state, he thinks, tentatively.)

He can’t help himself—he steals a car out of a dealership and drives the half hour to Shelbyville. The last time he was here, he’d barely paid attention between the airport and Becca’s hospital. Now, he drinks in every last detail.

He wanders the suburban streets, watching the quaint houses pass him by. Did any of these homes, any of these sidewalks with wild grass growing between the cracks, exist when Bucky had last been here? Is he walking paths he once had in a past life, or has it all been buried in asphalt and concrete?

Does he recognize this? Is he supposed to recognize it? Would Bucky feel nostalgic, returning home? Or did he leave Indiana behind him, letting himself be born anew as Cap’s partner at Camp Lehigh? He wishes he knew. 

He can’t tell the difference between memory and novelty, can’t tell if he’s noticing so much because he remembers or because he’s desperate to find something familiar in this foreign town. He sits at a bench in the park and stares out over the expanse of greenery and sports fields, looking for something, anything that might be familiar. He ends up with nothing, but he hears a mother chide her reckless son at a nearby playground, and he swears he hears her calling the child “Jim-jam.”

In the end, he knows he can’t stay here any longer. Bucky Barnes’s hometown would surely be one of the first places they’d look for him. He gets back in his stolen car and returns to the Indianapolis bus terminal to find a new destination.

* * *

Once Steve and Natasha are settled in well enough in the factory, food stores plentiful and makeshift beds gathered, they return to the Winter Soldier’s note—the triangle of PIERCE, MLAKAR, and INSIGHT.

MLAKAR obviously refers to Vitomir Mlakar, the unofficial face of Latveria’s brand new democracy movement, as Natasha described to Steve previously. The real question is in the other two, but before Steve can ponder it too long, Natasha pipes up.

“Pierce,” Natasha says and points at the word on the page, “That’s probably Alexander Pierce. He’s high up in SHIELD, I came across his name when I looked at Bucky’s employment files. He didn’t report to Pierce directly, at least not on paper, but if you followed the chain of his supervisors up the ladder, it led back to Pierce.” 

Steve blinks. “You looked at Bucky’s employment files?”

She shrugs. “I was looking for any info that might help. Looks like it did.”

With that squared away, they decide that their best lead now is to investigate other employees working under Pierce. If he has something to do with this whole mess, then surely some of his subordinates are involved. Natasha vanishes the next day to an internet cafe to...hack an IP? Fake a spoof? Steve can’t follow the terminology to save his life, but he knows she’s going to access the SHIELD servers remotely and hide her tracks so no one can trace it back to her location.

She comes back that evening with a scribbled list of names, addresses, and other details.

“I narrowed down the list to Pierce’s employees who live in the northern New Jersey area, since returning to New York is unsafe right now.”

SHIELD employees living in New Jersey. The conspiracy commutes. Steve almost wants to laugh.

“We can track some of them down at home and squeeze them for any details on what’s going on. Hopefully that’ll bring us to another lead.” Because otherwise, they don’t have much else to go off of right now. They can guess that “INSIGHT” refers to the Project Insight ‘Bucky’ had accidentally mentioned, but with no understanding of what the project actually entails, tracking down these employees is their best bet.

They move the next day. 

They drive half an hour north to a town called Glen Rock in pursuit of Brent Worstadt, a young agent in his mid-20s living at home with his parents. Said parents are out of town on vacation right now, making this the perfect time to catch young Brent alone for some questioning.

The drive there is quiet. Awkward, even. Steve feels like he’s just being tugged along right now, dead weight at Natasha’s side. He stares out the passenger side window and tentatively breaks the silence.

“So. What can you tell me about the Winter Soldier?”

“You’ll have to be more specific. I’ve known him since he trained me in the Red Room.”

“Well...start there, then. How long did he train you?”

“It’s hard to say. We smoothly transitioned from teacher and student to working together. We were the top of our prospective programs, after all.”

“Huh. What’s he like?”

“You couldn’t get much broader than that,” says Natasha with a smile, but she continues anyway. “He’s...complicated. He was the only one in the Red Room I could really trust. Everywhere had eyes and ears, you were always being watched, and any slight misstep could be reported. But I knew that I had privacy if I was with him, and he felt the same with me.” Her smile turns soft and wistful. “We never even did anything together, really. Nothing that would’ve gotten us in trouble. It was just...nice. It was safe.” 

The smile drops.

“But he was erratic. Some days, he was talkative and made jokes. Other days he was cold and hardly spoke at all. His memory was spotty. I didn’t know why at the time, but I think...I think he was like me. I think they messed with his mind to make him believe whatever they wanted, and either it messed with his memories or they specifically scooped them out somehow. I don’t know. I’m not sure even he knows, really.”

Steve doesn’t like the sound of that. It sounds too human. He understands that this person means something to Natasha, but Steve doesn’t want to view the impostor who slept in his home as a person with his own struggles. The only way he can keep it together right now is to view him as an abstract, evil entity—or else he starts to think of him too much like Bucky. And he can’t do that. He can’t let the Winter Soldier besmirch Bucky’s memory in his mind that way. So he clicks his mouth shut and drops it.

The rest of the drive is silent.

* * *

The next time the soldier decides to crawl out of the luggage compartment of a randomly chosen bus, he finds himself in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Perfect. This is about as random a location as he can find. And while there are security cameras everywhere, as in every city, he’s had plenty of experience dodging them.

Still, he’s cautious. That 1973 escape attempt he can’t remember weighs heavily on his mind. He knows from the report that he was found in a “flophouse”, so he knows now to avoid any sort of shelter. And, probably, any sort of hotel. That’s where transient people are, and that’s the first place they’ll look for him.

So his first order of business in Pine Bluff is to scout out the local apartment buildings and homes. Luckily, he finds an empty house in a small stretch of suburbia not far from the center of the city. Judging by the overgrown grass and boarded up windows, it’s condemned, which is perfect. The houses nearby also look to be empty, the abandoned home rendering the surrounding ones equally unappealing.

The soldier pries one of the boards covering the front door loose, just enough to slip in, and investigates his new base. It’s not particularly nice, soot staining the cracked walls and broken stairs, but that’s what he gets for picking a condemned house. Never mind, it’s sturdy enough, and isolated enough that there won’t be many people around to see him breaking into it.

He sighs and finally, finally relaxes. He slumps like a puppet with its strings cut off. And then he drops his bag on the dusty floor, collapses onto it, and promptly falls asleep.

He wakes up feeling well rested for the first time he can remember. Is it because he’s free, acting on his own accord? Did he sleep this well in 1973, too?

The soldier spends his first few days in Pine Bluff hiding out in the house, scribbling notes in Bucky’s biography by the daylight pouring through a chunk of missing roof on the decaying second floor. He reads it front to back, back to front, over and over, and every single time he feels like there’s yet another detail missing from the book that he hadn’t noticed before. So he scribbles it into the margins. Again and again, until most pages have some form of scribble on them, and some are so laden with his frantic handwriting that it’s hard to see any unmarked part of the page.

He has no idea if the details are real. The book says Bucky smuggled cigarettes into Camp Lehigh to trade with soldiers, but he has no idea if they really were Chesterfields, or if he’s just invented that in his head to try to make the mental image more vivid. There’s a photo of Bucky and Toro in their uniforms, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, grinning widely. Underneath it, he’s scribbled in hasty, uncontrolled penmanship,  _ preferred the ‘Toro tighty whiteys’ but hated when you pointed it out, especially if you called him Tarzan!  _ But he has no way of confirming or denying that.

He hopes the extra details are real, though. He really does. Because they’re the only hint he has of something before. They’re the only things that feel real, unmarred by the fogginess and doubt that comes with resets.

He pulled on the thread, like Natasha said, and now it’s the only thing keeping him from falling into nothingness, dangling by it over the edge of the abyss.

After four days of tearing through the book and only leaving the house to scrounge for food, the soldier finally decides to confront the USB drive full of his files once more. He’ll never be in a steadier position to do it, and…as terrifying as it is to plunge into the empty pit of his missing memories, he feels he needs to know. 

He goes to the library and sits himself down at one of the computers on the second floor. He pulls out the USB drive, sticks it into the computer, takes a deep breath, and plunges into the files. 

The list of files is long, and he chooses to open them at random. They are almost all mission reports, succinct descriptions of orders the soldier had completed over the years. He doesn’t remember many of them. Where that used to be a fact of his life, it now makes him feel sick at the loss of one of the only things he had for himself: his memories. And then he opens the oldest file, dated to 1945. May 1945, the same month Bucky died. 

Sure enough, the file describes in grisly detail how Bucky Barnes’s dead body was fished out of the ocean and experimented on like little more than a lab rat. Clinical words explain how he was dragged from death, only to be put “in storage” as soon as they realized he wasn’t a supersoldier like Captain America. How he was brought back out ten years later to have his damaged brain scrambled further with programming to turn him into the Winter Soldier.

Suddenly overcome with the feeling that his chest is about to burst open, the soldier grabs the USB drive out of the computer and dashes for the bathroom, where he falls to the floor and shakes. He can’t tell if he’s laughing or crying, but either way it comes in heaving jags.

He’d already known that he used to be Bucky Barnes himself. But it was something he deduced himself, scraped together from his untrustworthy memories and biased observations. To have it confirmed, to see it explained in such detail, to know that nothing about who he is now was something he ever agreed to or wanted...it is a fresh new horror.

He feels disgusting. He feels like dirt smeared on Bucky’s legacy. He feels like a joke. And he is—his past life as Bucky is exactly why Pierce chose him to keep watch over Steve Rogers, isn’t it? 

He wonders if this is the first time he’s wished that Department X left his body to rot in the ocean.

* * *

Here’s what they learn from Brent Worstadt and the next 3 SHIELD agents they make house visits to: Project Insight is some kind of plan Fury cooked up to keep the world safe by identifying—and “eliminating”—threats before they happen, and Pierce is impatient and trying to speed things up behind Fury’s back, hence the plan to depose Dr. Doom and install Mlakar as a Latverian leader who will cooperate with them.

While Natasha does the bulk of the work finding and interrogating agents, Steve keeps a close watch on the news. He’s good on a battlefield, but less so on covert operations like this, so this is his attempt to do  _ something  _ helpful. Now that he knows what sites and search terms to use, courtesy of Natasha, he can keep track of the information better.

And it does turn out to be useful. It’s hard to take the SHIELD agents at their word, but the news confirms everything they say. Over the course of their month-long factory stay and agent hunt, Steve finds articles describing how the Mlakar movement, as they now call themselves, has apparently invaded the Legislative Capitol Building as well as Doom Castle and installed Vitomir Mlakar as the new head of state. Dr. Doom, overwhelmed for the moment, has retreated into exile. Looking more closely at the photos, Steve is able to confirm—this wasn’t done with civilian movement alone. Many of the “protesters” in the photos are armed with SHIELD issue weapons, and expertly wielding them. This was, at least in part, driven by SHIELD agents using the weaponry Steve himself helped transport.

A week or so later, Steve finds a few more news articles, now discussing a sudden, drastic shift in the Latverian economy. Vitomir Mlakar has shifted priorities towards mining precious metals (presumably to be used in constructing Insight?) and the nation’s brightest minds are being lured to American engineering jobs en masse. There is no doubt in either Steve’s or Natasha’s minds that these jobs are being provided by SHIELD and are also related to Insight.

It sounds like a nightmare. It’s bad enough that Pierce has hijacked a huge portion of the entire SHIELD agency, including Commander Brooks and Steve’s own team, for his own purposes, leveraging it to essentially instigate a coup in Latveria as collateral damage for Insight. But to realize that, Pierce aside, Fury had devised Insight in the first place, some way to preemptively kill ‘dangerous people’ according to some unknown criteria he gets to decide, with no oversight or trial or even proof of their ‘danger’? That is a horror all its own. Steve knows that Natasha had a close relationship with Fury—he can’t imagine what’s going through her head right now. He himself feels nauseous at the idea that the very institution he’d spent so much of his life defending would do something so heinous. 

Unfortunately, they’re still not entirely clear on what shape Insight will take. It’s like they have all the pieces, they just don’t know how to put them together to make the whole. So they track down one of the highest-ranking SHIELD agents under Pierce, one Richard Underwood, and make him talk.

It takes a bit more effort than normal—one doesn’t attain a rank that high without some serious loyalty and security skills—but they eventually get the details out of him with some well-placed threats to his children that make Steve’s stomach churn.

Three helicarriers, set to monitor the world like satellites, constantly monitoring the entire population of the earth. All of them set to be programmed with an algorithm designed to identify threats early and kill them before they can do any damage. Sacrificing the few to protect the many.

The only thing that keeps Natasha and Steve from blanching in horror is that this matches with what they’ve already heard from the other agents and the news. It’s terrible and, knowing that Fury designed all of this in the first place, a huge betrayal, but it’s unfortunately nothing new. 

They’re about ready to leave, now that they have the information they came for, but Steve realizes there’s a piece in all this that he still doesn’t understand, and this Richard Underwood might be the only one left who can answer.

“Wait.”

Both Natasha and Richard freeze and look towards him.

“What about the Winter Soldier? How does he fit into all this?” 

Natasha’s jaw clenches and she gives the slightest of nods. Richard blinks in surprise, as though this is a complete non sequitur. Perhaps to him, it is. “The Winter Soldier was bought by SHIELD a little over ten years ago. He’s mostly been kept in stasis, but Pierce brought him back out full time to help with the Latverian agenda, and to keep an eye on Steve Rogers. Captain America’s an invaluable asset to the project, but he asks too many questions. So we had the Winter Soldier pose as his partner to keep him docile, make sure he didn’t stray too far.”

It’s all Steve can do to clench his jaw and keep himself from punching the man in the jaw. If they weren’t in disguise, he might’ve. (If they weren’t in disguise, Richard would’ve surely delivered the news in a much more horrifying, mocking fashion.) 

Natasha can clearly tell, because she wraps things up quickly.

“Fine. Thanks for cooperating, Richard. And remember, don’t dare tell anyone about our little chat, or you might find yourself and your family in hot water.”

And with that, they slip out of the Underwood home, as swiftly and quietly as they came. 

The car ride home has Steve’s head spinning. It makes him nauseous, to think that the Winter Soldier was not only manipulating him into Insight, but a SHIELD operative himself this whole time. And even more disgusting, that Pierce decided to force Steve into trusting him by making the Winter Soldier pretend to be his friend. It seems like an unnecessarily cruel twist—like Pierce noticed that the Winter Soldier bore a resemblance to his dead partner and decided to twist the knife. 

He can’t think about this nightmare right now. He has to talk about something else.

“So...you and the Winter Soldier. You said you two were close, so how’d you lose touch?” Because they clearly had, even if Nat never said it outright. They work on opposite sides now, and she only learned how he ended up there when some random SHIELD agent explained it. 

Natasha shrugs, trying to look casual but Steve is beginning to recognize the carefully hidden tension in her shoulders. “No clue. One day, I think sometime in the ‘70s, he just vanished. I asked around, but no one in the Red Room or Department X would give me an answer. It happens sometimes. I assumed that was the end of him. I didn’t...I didn’t know he’d been  _ bought _ .”

“Are Red Room agents like you not usually ‘bought’?” Steve asks. Natasha shakes her head.

“No. We’re contracted out, sometimes, but they always made it clear that, at the end of the day, we report to Department X. They liked to keep their assets close. I’ve never heard of anyone just...being sold off like that.”

Steve regrets asking. Now, not only does he feel violated and betrayed by the Winter Soldier, he also feels pity and disgust at the idea of him being treated like little more than the weapons he himself trafficked.

* * *

After the library, the soldier (Bucky? He is technically Bucky, after all. But no, he feels like his very existence is an insult to the man’s memory—) returns to his condemned home and does...nothing. He doesn’t know how to think or feel or react after that.

He stares at the USB drive like it’s some cursed, dangerous object. In a way, it is. It has saddled him with unbearable knowledge, but at the same time...at the same time, he’s grateful for it. It’s the end of the thread he’s been pulling on. It’s given him a past where he never had one. It’s a sick, perverse cruelty, but it’s his nevertheless.

After a few days of marinating in this newfound knowledge, this confirmation of his identity, he finally digs up the box of letters from his bag. He’d refused to read them before; after all, he was nothing more than an impostor. These letters were not meant for him, but rather for a dead man who’ll never get the chance to read them.

But now—now— 

In a way, he is the intended recipient after all. Bucky Barnes’s grave is empty, and his body is here, holding a box of letters from his sister. He may not quite be the man she was writing to, but he’s as damn close as anyone will ever get. Even if he doesn’t feel comfortable reading the letters for himself, he feels like he owes it to Becca. She wanted him to have these, after all.

He takes a deep breath, opens the box, and begins sifting through decades of letters. They chronicle Becca’s life through the ages, from high school onwards. The early letters are clearly a therapeutic exercise in coping with Bucky’s death. They’re wistful, full of “I wish you were here”s and speculation on where he’d be now if he were still alive. Many of them even come with photos. There’s Becca on her wedding day, beaming proudly at the camera. There’s Becca with her firstborn child. There’s Becca proudly volunteering at a non-profit to help veterans.

In more recent letters, her dementia becomes clear. She asks how he’s doing, where he’s been, why he won’t come to visit her. She speaks less about her life and more about how she regrets not having built a relationship with him and wishes he could come home; they have so little family left, after all. But she loves him—she emphasizes in every letter how much she loves him and is so happy he’s making a difference out there in the world. 

A lump forms in his throat. He’s crying now. And damn it, he’s  _ proud _ . He’s so proud of his baby sister, and he regrets having missed her entire life. He wants to go home and hug her and apologize, he wants to introduce her to all his teammates and friends from the war, he wants to go back to a time when they lived together with their father as a family.

He knows he can’t do that. But at the very least...at the very least, maybe Bucky Barnes  _ is  _ something he can reclaim. Maybe Bucky isn’t so dead after all.

* * *

Nick Fury has been doing some digging.

See, he knows there’s something funny going on. He hasn’t missed how SHIELD arms budgets have been seemingly drained out of nowhere. He hasn’t missed how Latverian protesters are armed with SHIELD-issued weapons. He hasn’t missed the influx of new hires in engineering, many of whom are on H-1B visas from Latveria. And he certainly hasn’t missed the Winter Soldier’s connections in all this.

In fact, the Winter Soldier is how he began tracking all of this down to begin with. In a way, he’s thankful to the assassin, because without him, Fury would never have started looking deeper into his own organization to find something rotten.

And of all people, it seems to lead straight to Alexander Pierce, one of the most loyal SHIELD agents he’s ever worked with. Why the hell is he bothering with all this, though? He can’t wrap his head around it. What a fucking nightmare.

Just as Fury is contemplating a drink, he notices a red dot on his chest.

And then the whole room explodes.

The living room window to the right of him shatters. He is tackled to the floor and falls onto shards of glass. There’s the crack of a gunshot. 

It’s not until seconds later that he comes into himself and realizes that someone just tried to kill him, and someone else knew about it and literally jumped in to save him.

“Let’s go,” says Captain America, terse, hauling Fury to his feet and running them out of the house at a crouch.

“What,” says Fury, “the  _ fuck _ .”

“Run now, talk later,” Black Widow shouts, her tone clipped.

Captain America and Black Widow lead him out of his home, through some back alleys, and to a car that, if it had to be described, could be called nothing other than “nondescript.” Widow roughly shoves him into the backseat and holds him down—not that he needs the help. Fury knows full well how to stay out of sight in a car.

Cap, meanwhile, scrambles into the driver’s seat and speeds off. Black Widow has a pistol in hand and keeps watch around them, in case they’re pursued.

It’s tense for about 15 minutes, but then Black Widow relaxes.

“Keep your eyes peeled, but we should be clear,” she says.

“Oh, great. Does this mean I get to find out what the fuck is going on now?” Fury grumbles.

“We’ll decide what you find out and when,” Widow says, her voice suddenly harsh. Swiftly, with rope she’d apparently brought, she ties his arms behind his back along with his feet. Then she covers his head with a black sack.

Fury gets the distinct feeling, for the first time in years, that he is thoroughly fucked.

Fifteen minutes later, they switch cars. Or at least, Fury can only assume so, by the sounds around him and the fact that Cap princess carries him to a backseat that feels very different.

They ride for another half hour and the car is completely silent. Then, finally, the car shuts off. Fury is princess carried (again! Nobody better be recording this, or he is going to destroy them) out and eventually settled none too carefully on the floor. 

The sack is pulled off his head, revealing Black Widow sternly standing over him in what looks like an abandoned building. There’s a couple of sleeping bags and blankets, a pile of non-perishable food, and a wall with papers taped up and an assortment of laptops and other devices on the floor beneath it. That’s where Cap is right now, scrolling through a phone.

Fury looks up at her and carefully says nothing. He already knows full well that Cap and Widow are angry, so he’s going to let them lead the conversation.

Widow is trying to bait him out, though. So there they stay in complete silence, staring at one another, waiting for someone to break.

Eventually, Black Widow tires of playing the waiting game.

“So? What did you find?” She doesn’t give any more detail than that. She doesn’t need to. Fury almost refuses to respond purely out of indignance, but he’s not blind to the rough treatment he’s being given. It’s in his best interest to play along. He sighs.

“SHIELD’s all tied up in this Latveria business. I’ve been figuring out why, how, and who.”

Widow nods. “That’s why they targeted you. You were digging too deep.”

In lieu of the obvious question, Fury raises an eyebrow. Widow gives him a withering look, almost a sneer, but relents.

“Pierce,” she says, and doesn’t add anything else. Seems she isn’t too charitable right now.

Fury nods. “Looks like he’s been orchestrating all of it. Somehow got the Winter Soldier involved too, probably. I...haven’t been able to figure out why yet.”

“He’s trying to speed Insight along,” says Cap, finally piping up from across the space. He doesn’t look up from his phone screen. “He got impatient and started all this with Latveria to get the resources to make it happen sooner.”

Well shit. He’d had this argument with Pierce plenty of times, and he’d thought they’d resolved it, but apparently not. Not to mention that apparently, Cap and Widow know about Insight now too.

“Why?” Cap says. He’s looking straight at Fury now with a look of furious determination. “Why make Insight in the first place?”

Fury shifts so he can sit with his back straight, as dignified as one can be when tied up in an abandoned building.

“Because the world is getting to be a more dangerous place, and the only way we’re going to keep people safe is removing the danger before it comes to pass.” 

“Oh, and  _ you’re _ the one who gets to decide who’s ‘dangerous’?”

Fury raises an eyebrow. “Aren’t we?”

Cap snaps his jaw shut, tosses the phone to the ground, and walks to the furthest part of the space. Fury’s sure that, if there had been another room in here, Cap would’ve barged into it and slammed the door behind him.

“If you think I regret anything about Insight, I don’t—only that Pierce took things into his own hands.”

“And the Winter Soldier?” says Widow, still glaring down at him.

“If you think I know how he’s tied up in all this, you’ve got another thing coming. I’m still working that out myself. Why, what’s he up to?”

“Missing. Spent months playing at Bucky Barnes, spying for Pierce under all our noses, then split when he accidentally let slip about Insight to Steve.”

“ _ Shit _ . Really? Goddamn. Well, wherever he is, we’ve gotta find him and contain him, make sure he doesn’t add any more gas to this shitshow of a fire. If we do this right, we might even be able to get him to—”

“ _ No. _ ” Fury is stunned into silence by the force of her words and begins to realize just how ruined his relationship is with Widow now. “He’s had enough of taking orders. And I’m certainly not letting him take any from  _ you _ .”

Cap approaches from the dark corners. “The only thing we’re doing now is cleaning up the mess you made.”

* * *

Bucky curses. There’s more cars than usual parked on the street outside the condemned house that’s been his makeshift home for the past few weeks. To be more precise, there’s more vans. They’re constantly either parked on the block or lazily driving past the house. He’s gotten too lax, stayed too long in one place, let himself get too comfortable.

SHIELD has found him and they’re going to take him back. It’s 1973 all over again.

Except it’s not. He refuses to let this just happen, refuses to not do better. He’s going to make it out of this, one way or another.

Bucky takes another day to see if there’s any patterns he can memorize in the vans—where they park, when they park, how many there are of them, when they drive by. He also takes that day to collect himself, because he is on the verge of absolute panic and despair. Bucky knows he can’t wait around much longer, or they’ll make the first move on him, but he also can’t do this if he’s incapacitated by terror. 

At dawn the next day, Bucky makes his move. He’s packed his bag and slid his arms through the handles like it’s a backpack. He’s got his hat on. He’s got his contingency plan packed—although he hopes he won’t need it. Dear god, how he hopes he won’t need it.

And he moves.

He creeps out the back, through the messy backyard. It’s hard to see through the thick shrubbery, and is nearly invisible from the street, thankfully. He sneaks into the yard of the house neighboring him in the backyard. This house is occupied, and the yard is neatly trimmed, so it’s much trickier to move through without notice. He can only hope that the occupants are either asleep, or still groggy enough that they won’t notice anything.

Once he makes his way around the edge of this yard onto the next street over, he’ll be in a much better position. Bucky will be able to break into someone’s car, hotwire it, and make his escape. He still won’t be safe, but he’ll at least be mobile and have the flexibility of switching cars as needed. It’ll be much harder to catch him once he gets a vehicle.

What he didn’t expect, though, was for SHIELD vans to be parked on this block as well. They prepared for the possibility of him escaping this way. By the time Bucky has crawled his way along the perimeter fence closer to the sidewalk, he’s been spotted and surrounded. He’s doomed.

Dozens of agents pour out of the vans, ready to subdue him. Bucky fights, of course he does. He kicks, he punches, he even bites. He takes no prisoners. He hits as hard as he can with his metal fist, knowing full well he is shattering bones and liquefying organs, letting bodies drop around him. What’s a few more bodies added on to his count, anyway? At least for the first time in decades, he’s doing it of his own free will.

Unfortunately, he is not unstoppable. And these SHIELD agents, the ones who have trained and handled him for over a decade, know it. They know exactly how to subdue him, and they know that he works best in stealth against a few select targets.

Even the Winter Soldier can be outnumbered.

It begins with tackling. One agent throws himself at Bucky, who throws him off easily. Then another, and another, and soon he’s being tackled from all directions. His balance is thrown off and he topples to the ground, and that’s when he knows it’s over. The bodies keep piling atop him, as if there’s still a chance of him wriggling his way out, and one of the few agents left standing ties his limbs together with sturdy wire rope, then gags him.

Now that he’s subdued, the pile of agents gets off of him. A select few grab him and carry him into a van while he struggles against the restraints like a feral animal. The remaining agents drag their fallen comrades into the vans too.

In the cold darkness of the windowless van, Bucky can’t see what happens next, but he can feel it—an agent plunges some needle into the crook of his neck and it only takes a few seconds before he nods off to sleep to the sound of the van starting up. 

By the time Pine Bluff, Arkansas fully awakens for the new day, Bucky Barnes has vanished.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My Jersey ass just Kool-Aid Man busted through the wall of this New York-based fic to cram NJ into it. I swear I didn't mean to, but it was convenient and before I knew it, North Jersey was just part of the fic. I'd say "identify the city with Steve and Nat's abandoned factory" but there's probably a lot of cities like this in the area.
> 
> Would Dr. Doom fight back against a coup with a ruthless robotic fist? Oh, absolutely. Do I want to write that out? Hellllllll no.
> 
> PS, if you're confused about the "Toro Tarzan" comment, please know that [this](https://images.plurk.com/5v5NjNr9IWFhBdutgjpYtu.png%20) is what his official wartime hero costume looked like. God, I love comics. 
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["DESTROYA" by My Chemical Romance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGi7Uk7ikgY&ab_channel=MyChemicalRomance-Topic).
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com).


	9. life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on

It has been a week since the soldier’s last reset.

He knows this because his head was full of cotton in a way that only ever comes from a reset. It’s receding now, thankfully, but it’s certainly the most unpleasant part of a reset.

_ (No it’s not.) _

He doesn’t remember what led to the reset, exactly. Of course he doesn’t, that’s the whole point of them, after all. But he knows he can be impulsive and take unnecessary risks that jeopardize his missions. It’s an unfortunate habit of his that neither he nor his superiors have quite been able to quash in all these years. No matter how they try to freeze or fry it out of him, it stubbornly persists.

So, the resets continue. The fogginess continues. The memory loss continues. If he’s being honest with himself  _ (if he had the words to be honest with himself) _ , he hates it. He hates not knowing what’s taking place or where he’s been or why things are happening around him. He hates his reckless nature that makes the resets necessary in the first place.

But it’s fine. If he’s supposed to know what’s happening and why, then they’ll tell him. And they always give him the treatment he needs to get the job done. Even if it hurts. That’s the price he pays to do the work no one else can.

A necessary sacrifice.

His orders this past week have been to play security guard to the control room for Project Insight. He’s not sure what Insight even is, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that he stands at this door and keeps the wrong people out, and lets the right people in. And keeps an eye on those ‘right people’ to make sure they don’t do anything shifty. Of course.

And yet. Something feels off. He’s not supposed to care about Insight, but he wants to know. He listens in to snatches of conversation between the technicians and what he assumes is a low-tech AI. His body feels strangely off-kilter, rickety, unbalanced. He wonders. What even necessitated this last reset, anyway?

That night, he finally discovers at least one piece of the puzzle. The unbalanced feeling is coming from his arm. Something’s not right with it. In the tiny room that makes up his quarters, when he’s meant to be asleep, he pops off the panel at the crook of his elbow. It’s not meant to be so easily removable, but he’s always been able to put it back in place with no issues.

_ (Always? When? This feels familiar, but when has he—) _

With the panel removed, it’s clear to see what’s wrong. Something has been wedged into the internal wiring of his forearm. When he pulls it out, he realizes it’s sheets of paper, folded over and rolled into a tube around a USB drive. 

When he unfolds the papers, he realizes they’re pages, ripped out of a book. And beyond just the printed text, they’re also covered in handwritten notes, so tightly packed that it’s nearly impossible to read. He turns each of the pages over, back to front, looking for anything that stands out from the overwhelming swarm of text and scribbles. Finally, he finds it—a page featuring a large photo of a face ( _ his _ face, he distantly realizes) with large text, almost like a title page: _ Bucky Barnes: Separating Fact From Fiction _ .

Beneath the title, he sees a large, hastily scrawled  _ THIS IS YOURS.  _ And then with an added violent underline:  _ TAKE IT BACK _ .

* * *

The soldier spends the next several days performing his duties in a haze. He feels like he’s watching himself from above, like he’s a ghost who doesn’t really inhabit a body. The notes and the USB drive (which he can only check on a technician’s laptop that he steals away for a few hours at a time before returning) tell him he has a name, he had a life, and that he was ripped away from it to be reformed into whatever Department X wanted. He remembers none of this and isn’t even sure he believes it. How can it be real, if he doesn’t remember any of it?

But then, how can there possibly be SHIELD documents about it? Who could have written these scribbles, in his own handwriting?

It can’t be real, and yet the soldier (Bucky Barnes?) gets the feeling that it is.

After all, if the resets have been caused not by his impulsivity, but rather by him beginning to remember things...then small wonder that he has no memory of this.

He says nothing. He does nothing. What can he possibly do with this knowledge, trapped here in this base doing nothing but going back and forth between his quarters and the control room? Maybe it’s not even real. Maybe he isn't real. Maybe none of this is real.

His ghost, hovering overhead, falls apart in a trembling mess. His body remains stockstill as ever.

It happens the day that a technician accidentally flips a switch with a misplaced elbow and a series of explosions rocks one of the Insight helicarriers.

“Shit!” one swears.

“You dumbass! We’re supposed to launch in two days, we don’t have time for this!” yells another.

Once the technicians are done blaming each other, they run out of the room to rush down to the helicarrier to investigate the damage and begin repairs. The soldier does not move, because his orders are to stay here. He is alone now.

Except for, apparently, the AI. Green characters blink to life on a black screen in the shape of a distorted face, embedded within a veritable wall of ancient-looking computers. 

“The Winter Soldier,” it creaks out in a haunting, mechanical tone. “It seems we have the room to ourselves.”

“Seems like it,” says the soldier’s body.

“I am Arnim Zola,” says the AI. “Do you remember me? We fought plenty of times during the war.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Not as the Winter Soldier, no. But we butted heads plenty of times when you were Bucky, running around with Captain America and the Invaders.”

“How do you know about that?” Against his will, the soldier is being dragged back into his body, and his tremulous voice betrays him.

“How does it feel, to be twisted into the wrong shape? Made to do things you would never do?” Zola’s voice almost hisses in delight.

“I don’t know what I would do. If you’re talking about...Bucky, that’s not me.”

“But it was, once. Don’t you want that back?”

“I don’t know.” That’s a lie. He does. Not so much to return to something, he can’t return to something he never knew; but he’s fascinated by the idea of being someone and having a life of his own to fill in all the blank spaces.

“What about revenge, perhaps, against those who did this to you? Continue to use you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hmm,” Zola hums. “Perhaps you aren’t him after all. Bucky was never so indecisive.” The faint sound of footsteps in the distance—the technicians must be returning. “Looks like our time is coming to an end. What a lovely chat we could have, when the propulsion gate switches cause chaos to the carriers below.”

Zola’s screen goes dark, the door opens, and the technicians return to their positions.

* * *

It takes them another week to find where SHIELD is housing the helicarriers, and not a second too soon. They don’t know when Insight is set to launch, but between what they’ve gathered from agents and what they’ve seen in the news, it has to be soon.  _ Very  _ soon.

Natasha and Steve break into the base, a warehouse in Red Hook. It’s just the two of them; they left Fury behind in the factory in New Jersey, tied up with nothing but a microphone and a small speaker that connect to the earpieces both Natasha and Steve are wearing. Given that Fury architected Insight to begin with, he’s not to be trusted—but he might be able to feed them some helpful info. 

Natasha disables what must be a dozen sensors and cameras before they’re able to drop in through a window by the ceiling. Inside, the warehouse is absolutely barren—not surprising. They know that, whatever form Insight takes, it would be bigger than anything that could fit just about anywhere in the jampacked city. So there have to be basement levels instead. 

There are only so many doors in an open-plan warehouse like this. It’s not hard to find the one that leads to flights upon flights of stairs below ground. Natasha takes the lead, identifying and taking out security cameras as they go, while Steve brings up the rear, shield out to defend them.

They make it all the way down the stairs to a door that leads into a clinical looking hallway. Once they’re sure it’s clear, they step out and gather their bearings.

“Fury,” Steve whispers into the earpiece, turning back to look at the door they just came from, “We’re in a hallway. Just came out of stairway 7E. Where to next if we want to take this thing down?”

He hears some grumbling on the other end of the earpiece, before finally:

“Helicarriers to the right, control room to the left.” Steve trusts him, at least for now, because Fury knows which side his bread is buttered on.

‘Control room’ sounds like a good bet, and when he points to the left, Natasha nods in agreement, so they both set off towards the room.

And that’s when they’re spotted.

An agent rounds a corner down the hallway towards them, whistling casually, and stops dead in his tracks when he realizes there are two intruders.

For a brief moment, nobody moves.

Then Natasha runs straight for him, trying to knock him out before he can raise any alarms. Unfortunately, the agent is too quick and the distance between them too long—the agent is able to press a panic button embedded in his wristwatch just before Natasha knocks him out.

Now alarms are blaring and red lights are flashing, alerting every damn SHIELD agent in the base about their infiltration.

“Shit,” says Steve, eloquently. 

They start sprinting down the hallway, following its twists and turns, fully ready to take down any agents they come across immediately. But strangely, there appear to be none. The hallways are utterly empty save for the flashing red lights and the harsh screech of the alarm.

They pause, partially because they’ve reached a fork in the hallway, and partially because they’re uneasy at the lack of response. They share a nervous glance, trying to figure out what this means, where to go next.

It doesn’t take long to understand why no one has come for them yet.

* * *

When the alarm goes off, the auxiliary security doors of the control room immediately slam shut with a booming slam. The soldier tenses in surprise while all the technicians startle. They all look to the door, which sure enough is now blocked off by 2-inch thick steel.

This must mean intruders. On the day of the launch, no less.

The speakers in the room crackle to life with Pierce’s voice.

“Soldier, go confront the intruders. They are making their way here from stairway 7E. Technicians, continue working. We’re on a tight schedule. If necessary, you have your issued backup weapons to defend yourselves.”

They all nod in understanding, and the soldier presses the security override button. The steel wall opens up like an elevator to reveal the regular door. He steps out and hears the click of the door as well as the steel closing shut once more. He takes barely two steps from the control room when he spots two figures running into his line of sight from around the corner.

The soldier readies himself for a fight, but then freezes.

Oh.

Oh, fuck.

That’s Natasha and Captain America—Steve. 

* * *

For a minute, Steve’s brain stops working.

It’s Bucky.

Bucky is here.

Except it’s not, he remembers, watching the red alarm lights reflecting off that metal arm. This is the Winter Soldier. The reason agents haven’t been pouring out of every corner to attack them is because they don’t need to. Not when the Winter Soldier is their security guard.

Natasha goes so rigid, her pistol trembles in her hands as she aims. Steve doesn’t even notice, because as soon as he regains control of his body, he charges in, shield first. 

He expects gunshots, he expects a fight, he expects blood and brutality and a notorious assassin. He expects the kind of casual cruelty that there must exist in a man who would pretend to be a dead war hero, his _ best friend _ , for months on end purely to manipulate him.

Instead, what he gets is something much milder. No gunshots, and Steve makes the first move by plowing right into the soldier with his shield like a battering ram. The soldier returns his force in kind, but only in retaliation. He kicks Steve’s legs out from under him, but doesn’t take the advantage to disarm him or pin him. He punches Steve in the jaw, in the gut, in the throat, but never with the metal arm.

It infuriates him. He knows that the Winter Soldier acts on orders, that he never cared about Steve at all, but he almost wants him to. Steve needs him to fight his hardest, because he needs this monster to care. He needs the soldier to feel this pain and anguish in his bones, because Steve certainly does, and he needs this to be a fair fight. Because if Steve is going to beat someone to death, he at least wants to feel like they deserved it.

He gets lucky with a solid punch to the soldier’s face, and he goes staggering, off-balance. 

“What, you’re suddenly going easy on me now that you’re done stringing me along like an idiot?” Steve roars. “If you’re going to pretend to be Bucky, do us both a favor and at least fight like him!”

“I’m not—I don’t—” the soldier rasps and spits out a gob of blood. When he looks up, it’s with an expression of grim, almost feral determination that looks so Bucky it  _ hurts _ . Steve feels his blood boil again.

Maybe everything about him makes Steve angry. Everything about this situation makes him angry. There’s nothing he can do that will make this okay. There’s nothing he can do that will make him feel better. There’s nothing he can do that will undo this desecration of Bucky’s memory.

He blinks the tears out of his eyes, because Steve refuses to let the Winter Soldier have the satisfaction of making him cry. It’s just as well because the soldier is throwing himself at Steve now, wrenching the shield off his arm and pinning him against the wall. Steve struggles and raises his leg to kick the man off of him, but then a gunshot rings out.

Natasha.

Both Steve and the soldier stop and stare at her. She looks furious, even more so with every step she takes closer to them. Her pistol is still trained squarely on the soldier.

“Soldier,” she barks. “Stand back. Arms up.”

Strangely enough, he does so. Natasha jerks her head at Steve, telling him to get to her side, and he does. He picks up his shield as he goes.

Steve quickly checks over the soldier, because he certainly didn’t feel that bullet. But the soldier doesn’t look injured either. That is, until he looks more closely—there, on the metal arm, is a blackened spot where the bullet must have hit. 

It’s strange, this moment of silence. The roaring in Steve’s head has died down. Now there’s nothing left but heavy breathing on all sides.

“You let slip information and ran off, and now you’re back here. Why?” Natasha demands. When the soldier doesn’t respond, she raises her voice. “Well?”

“I didn’t realize I ran,” he says, voice strangely quiet. It doesn’t fit a notorious assassin. It doesn’t fit Bucky.

Natasha’s grip on the gun shifts. Steve doesn’t know what that means.

“I was reset a week and a half ago. I don’t know why,” the soldier continues. “All I know is that I was...undercover for a while. Then I was reset and assigned to guard duty here.”

“What do you mean, ‘reset’?” says Natasha, her voice tight.

The soldier doesn’t explain. Instead, he slowly, slowly lowers his arms, keeping his hands visible, and moves his right hand to his left arm. Steve tenses, prepared for an attack of some kind, but Natasha doesn’t shoot. The soldier pops a panel off of the metal arm and pulls out a roll of some kind. He tosses it towards them, and the roll skitters across the floor.

Carefully, Steve edges towards it as though it’s a threat. But then he realizes, it’s just paper. He picks them up and his breath hitches immediately.

They’re pages of a book, likely Bucky’s biography, if the words he scans over indicate anything. But there’s scribbled notes everywhere of tiny little details that never got mentioned, were never spoken—tiny things that even Steve has forgotten until just now.

And on the title page, under the photo of Bucky that he now can’t untangle from the soldier, _ THIS IS YOURS. TAKE IT BACK _ .

The rage returns, this time with bile rising in his throat and tears forming in his eyes. How dare he? How dare he continue to throw this in his face? Bucky Barnes is dead. Bucky Barnes is dead, Steve killed him, and the Winter Soldier seems to be on a personal mission to throw it back in his face as much as possible. 

The pages crumple and begin to rip under his increasingly tight and shaky grasp. He throws them to the ground.

“You’re a bastard,” he grinds out, lunging for the soldier.

Everything happens at once. The soldier, moving almost faster than he can see, pulls out a smoke grenade and smashes it to the ground. Natasha reaches out to grab Steve but he’s already out of range. She’s yelling, “ _ Steve, don’t! _ ”

Not that it matters.

By the time the smoke dissipates, the soldier is gone. But not far, it appears. Steve is still seething, but Natasha, ever the professional, presses on. Just up ahead is the room the soldier initially came out of, but the door is broken, half shattered. And beyond that, thick steel walls that he apparently forced open with his bare hands.

All that raw strength, and the Winter Soldier refused to use it on him.

Natasha and he step into the room cautiously and find themselves in a whole new situation they don’t know how to deal with.

* * *

Natasha’s head spins. She is in a room full of technicians and computers and switches and monitors—the control room, she distantly realizes—which alone would be enough to wrap her head around. But then there’s the soldier, fighting all the technicians himself in the cramped space.

There are four of them ganging up on him at once, and while they’re not particularly skilled in combat, they do have guns. Shots are flying wild—these idiots have clearly never been trained properly on how to use their weapons—and it’s only a matter of time until the soldier is shot. Or worse, herself or Steve.

She steps in to help, ripping the gun out of one technician’s hand before he can fire it at the soldier. She grabs his arm and flips him over hard onto the ground before restraining him.

“Natasha, what are you doing!” Steve hisses. 

“Cleaning up,” she grunts. Her patience with him is wearing thin. Ever since they encountered the Winter Soldier in here, he’s been volatile and, honestly, stupid. Or perhaps she’d been stupid, to think that discovering ‘Bucky’ was an impostor all along wouldn’t affect him this much.

Even so, it’s not an excuse to rampage recklessly. God knows how much Natasha wants to wreck shit right now. Boys.

The soldier, meanwhile, has already dispatched two of the technicians who were on him, and is starting on the third. He’s not as gentle as Natasha was; he’s clearly not interested in non-lethal apprehension. One technician lays on the ground with a snapped neck. The other is on the opposite side of the soldier, bleeding out from a head wound that looks like it came from the soldier turning the man’s own gun against him.

Natasha stands by Steve and watches the soldier take out the final technician. She doesn’t step in, because by this point, he doesn’t need the help and her interference would just throw him off.

Sure enough, the soldier ruthlessly snaps the man’s gun-wielding arm like a twig, then uses the metal arm to chop at his throat with such force that the man dies on the spot. The body falls to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.

There’s a moment of silence, of shock, but then Steve jumps the soldier, slamming him against the wall and restraining his arms.

“Steve,  _ stop— _ ” Natasha starts, but then halts. 

A noise crackles as the far wall, full of old computers, comes to life.

* * *

“Well, well. Looks like quite the party here.”

The voice is distorted, mechanical, but also oddly familiar in a way that causes chills to run down Steve’s spine. Making sure to lean his strength into keeping the Winter Soldier subdued, Steve looks over to the source.

A wall of computers that he distinctly remembers pulling out of Camp Lehigh, reassembled and now, apparently, operational.

And the voice…

“Long time no see, Captain,” it says.

“...Zola?” Steve replies weakly.

“In the flesh.” The computers make a sound somewhat akin to chuckling. “So to speak.”

“What...what is this?”

“Not all of us were so lucky as to be preserved perfectly in ice, Captain.”

“What are you doing here?” Then it clicks. “Are you behind all this?”

“Behind all what?” Zola asks, mechanical voice ever so light and casual.

“Insight! SHIELD! Everything!” Steve yells.

It makes a horrible kind of sense. Nazi Germany and Hydra may have fallen, but there are always a few stragglers in any conflict who escape. Seeing defeat on the horizon, Zola must have preserved himself in some computerized form, a form that was...somehow recovered and moved to Camp Lehigh? And from there he was able to infiltrate SHIELD and execute his next evil plan, somehow convincing Fury and Pierce and the entire organization that Insight was right and good and necessary.

As terrible as it is, it gives Steve some solace. At least now he knows that the organization that he worked for wasn’t always evil and seeking to control or kill the populace. It had just been hijacked by an evil man, an enemy of the state, and warped into this monstrosity.

Zola must have been the one to come up with assigning the Winter Soldier to play at Bucky, a cruel joke to get back at his enemy.

“I’m sure you’d like to think that, Captain,” Zola says, breaking Steve out of his thoughts. “Tell me, have you ever heard of Operation Paperclip?”

It sounds familiar, he thinks, from those history books he read when he first found himself in the future. But Steve can’t for the life of him remember the context of it or when it took place or who was involved.

His silence is answer enough.

“After the war, America paid to have thousands of German scientists come here to strengthen the American space program, so as not to be outdone by the Soviets. Post-war tensions and all that, you see. I was brought here to join the newly formed SHIELD.

“But my health began to fail. I was only human, after all. By 1973, I was on my deathbed. I was ready to die peacefully. I’d finished my work, and I was done. I did not expect SHIELD to take my body and transfer my mind onto hundreds of tapes and computers. You see, I was done with SHIELD, but SHIELD was not done with me.

“I have been trapped here, Captain, for decades. You do not understand what it means, to be forced to continue past your limits and desires.” Zola’s voice has now turned harsh, resentful. “You think Insight was my idea? No. I was merely resurrected to make it better, faster. I was never a person to you Americans, merely an amalgamation of knowledge and skill. And now, you have made that the truth of my existence.”

Steve feels bile rise in his throat. Under his arms, he can feel the Winter Soldier vibrating—trembling, perhaps? 

“Do us both a favor, Captain,” Zola hisses, “and destroy me.”

Steve feels like the rug has been pulled out from under him, mind recontextualizing everything he knows a second time in the past two minutes. He would never have imagined feeling such a twisted pity for one of his enemies, but here he is. He could be lying, but to what end? What benefit would destroying this computerized Zola bring? Nothing but his death. 

It disgusts him, to think that the organization that brought him back to life, that he’d been working under for months, could do something so heinous that death would be preferable. He thought he’d seen the depths of depravity in the war, in the battlefields and the camps and the human experiments. He couldn’t have imagined that his own country, the cause he was fighting for, could be just as inhumane.

But, well, here he is.

The past and everything he thought he once knew is long gone. This is now, and now is filled with brand new atrocities.

He can’t keep clinging to old ideas of who’s right and who’s wrong; of what America stands for; of what New York is meant to be like; of who Bucky is. They don’t mean anything anymore.

It’s time to kill the past.

* * *

“Steve,” Natasha warns, but it’s too late. The captain’s grip has slackened in his silence. The soldier doesn’t know why or what he’s thinking, but it doesn’t matter right now. It doesn’t take much for him to slip out of his grasp and dart for the control board full of buttons and switches.

“Shit!” The captain swears.

The soldier throws himself onto the board, swinging his arm across the entire set of propulsion gate switches. He only vaguely understands what they do from the incident two days ago, and isn’t able to aim carefully enough to make sure he doesn’t hit any stray buttons that might do something completely unexpected or disastrous. 

It’s dumb, it’s stupid, it’s reckless, it’s impulsive—it’s all the things he would get reset for. And that’s exactly why he does it.

If Bucky was reckless, if Bucky jumped into danger without hesitation, if Bucky moved before he had a solid plan, then the soldier wants to as well. It’s the one thing they never managed to rip out of him in all these decades, and now that he knows where it came from? He wants to embrace it wholeheartedly. He spent years thinking it was something to be ashamed of, a fault in his brain that made him inconvenient, insubordinate. But now, he’s going to make it a point of pride.

It’s the one thing those bastards could never rip out of him. It’s  _ his _ , and he’s going to use it to take this entire organization down.

Explosions rock the entire complex. The force of them sends the soldier, already unbalanced across the control board as he is, toppling to the floor. The dull rumble sounds like it’s quite far away, but it must be quite serious if they can feel the ground quaking under them all the way here. The soldier glances up to the monitors showing the camera feeds that watch over every helicarrier from every imaginable angle and realizes exactly what he’s done. There’s fire and explosions bursting on every single screen as the helicarriers are reduced to shrapnel.

He laughs, almost delirious. He really did it. He really fucking did it.

But his laughter is nothing compared to Zola’s triumphant, manic cackling.

“Yes! I knew it was only a matter of time! Destroy it! Destroy every last thing they made from us!”

The soldier grunts and opens his mouth to speak. He’s not sure if Zola quiets down, or if it just feels like his voice is fading out.

“I’m...I’m not Bucky...but I’m going to be.”

No. This isn’t how he wants to sound, faltering and small. Bucky Barnes doesn’t sound like this. He projects, he speaks with confidence and certainty.

“I was him, once, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything from before the Winter Soldier. All I had were the notes that I must have hidden for myself. And now that I know…” he clenches his fists, “I’m going to be a person again. And  _ nobody’s _ going to stop me.”

“The fallen trees...you heard them,” Natasha whispers. The soldier nods, looking into her eyes and only seeing understanding. Her words ring a bell, and he’s not sure why. But they feel right. 

This feels right.

* * *

_ How did this happen? _ Steve can’t help but think. How did things get so fucked up that the Winter Soldier saves the day while Arnim Zola gleefully cheers him on? When did the whole world flip on its head?

Steve doesn’t want to trust the Winter Soldier. Surely faking a heartfelt confession like that is child’s play to him after he pretended to be Bucky for months on end. Surely he can’t trust anything he says or does—it’s why he disregarded those notes in the first place. But if he was just acting, just treating Steve as the fool, why would he have blown all the helicarriers up? Why would he have sabotaged the mission he was working on? Unless it was a way to fake him out, make him think he was on Steve’s side.

But, his gut twists in protest, he doesn’t think that is the case. He thinks back to Zola, a dead man resurrected. Stripped away of his humanity and dragged back from death to obey orders. If this really is Bucky, the same could be said of him. A corpse reanimated, memories scrubbed away, repurposed for someone else’s machinations.

And here Zola is, begging for death. And here the Winter Soldier is, ready to live.

_ Kill the past. _

Steve tightens his grip on the shield and pivots, throwing all his weight into driving the edge of the shield into the wall of Zola-computers. Metal crunches and yields. Sparks fly. The monitor with Zola’s green-and-black text face flickers. Zola cackles anew, delighted. Steve stabs again. And again. And again, and again. Over and over, he plunges the shield into the circuitry. Zola’s laughter begins to cut in and out, the monitor flickers more frequently.

“Yes! Tha-nk you, Ca-ptain,” Zola stutters in his final moments.

The screen goes black.

Steve doesn’t stop.

He continues, tearing each and every facet of the computers apart until he’s certain that they can’t be pieced back together. Nothing but a wall of sparks and ruins.

He turns around, panting, to see that Natasha has helped the Winter Soldier off the floor. He clenches his jaw and stares the other man in the eyes. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for. Neither, it seems, does the soldier.

“Okay. Fine.” He gives a single terse nod to the soldier. He doesn’t know how to talk about this right now. He doesn’t know how to feel.

“We have to...we’re not done here. We came here to take down Insight, but now we have to take down all of SHIELD.” After what he just witnessed with Zola, he’s convinced it’s not just the one project or person or section of SHIELD that’s rotten; it’s the whole thing. All of it needs to go down. Judging by the way Natasha’s eyes hardens and the soldier nods, they agree.

* * *

They set their plan into motion. Natasha and the soldier go hunt down Pierce to subdue him. Steve stays in the control room and uses the microphone controls to broadcast a message to the entire complex, where every agent will hear it at once.

Natasha lets the soldier take the lead. He knows this facility better than she does (which is to say, at all) and will have a better idea of where Pierce may be.

In fact, it turns out he knows  _ exactly  _ where Pierce is.

“He doesn’t like to leave his office. He stays isolated and watches over everything from afar,” the soldier grumbles. He leads Natasha to another staircase, one that goes even deeper than the one she and Steve entered from, taking them to a lower level.

They don’t run into many agents there. After all, most were working on the helicarriers in some capacity or another, prepping them for launch. Not many have a reason to be down here in what appears to be some sort of administrative floor. Natasha has her pistol out and ready just in case, but it turns out to be unnecessary. Even the few agents they do run into immediately pale at the sight of the Winter Soldier and hastily plaster themselves to the wall, trying to get out of their way as much as possible.

It’s certainly convenient.

Only a few minutes later, they find themselves standing outside a nondescript door. There is no label or number or anything to identify it and what might be beyond it. But Natasha knows Pierce is inside by the way the soldier stares at the door, body fully tensed, as he takes a deep breath. He’s preparing himself.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she murmurs. “I’ll back you up.”

He nods. Takes one last breath. Then elbows the door open.

Sure enough, Pierce is sat at a mahogany desk in an office covered in warm wood tones. It sets a sharp contrast to the blinding white and concrete of the rest of the underground facility. Pierce looks up in confusion, but considering the explosions and Natasha’s presence behind the Winter Soldier, he seems to understand his precarious position. He raises his arms in a gesture of peace.

“Soldier,” Pierce says, stern but not unkind. “Why aren’t you at your post?”

Then the Winter Soldier whips out a pistol and shoots Pierce directly between the eyes.

Pierce’s body slumps over in his seat and falls to the floor with a dull thud, almost inaudible in the aftermath of the deafening gunshot.

The soldier walks over the body to confirm the kill. Natasha didn’t know what he was planning to do, but she can’t say she’s surprised.

And she certainly holds no pity for the man. He got what he deserved, from the person who most deserved to give it to him.

“Congratulations,” she says when the soldier returns. She places a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You’re a free man now.”

Finally, the tension bleeds out of the soldier’s body and his clenched jaw loosens into a tentative grin, a warm expression that Natasha hasn’t seen since moments snatched in secret together so many decades ago.

“And you’re a free woman,” he says.

She smiles. So she is.

* * *

While Natasha and the Winter Soldier (Bucky? Fuck, they’re going to have to work this out—) seek out Pierce, Steve stays behind in the control room. The soldier had told him that there’s a microphone here with controls to broadcast to the entire facility, and he intends to reach every remaining SHIELD agent in the building.

Because taking out SHIELD is not just a matter of taking out the heads of the organization, but convincing the rank and file to surrender as well. Or else they’ll just reform and rise up once more.

Steve takes a few moments to compose his speech. Charisma and public speaking were definitely among his strengths in the war, but this situation is so foreign, so sickening, so personal in a way the war never was, that he still feels nervous. He’s not motivating his own men this time; he’s trying to get an enemy faction to lay down their weapons. Although, he supposes, they are still his men. That’s part of the problem.

He takes a deep breath, leans in, then pushes down on the broadcast button.

“Attention, everyone. This is Captain America. If you heard those explosions earlier, we set them off to bring an end to Project Insight. Nick Fury is captured in our custody. Alexander Pierce has been removed. SHIELD is disbanded as of right now.

“Know this: Insight was the last straw. We are not the moral arbiters of right and wrong. A shadowy organization that imposes its values on everybody else with no recourse or consideration is no different to a dictatorship. And that’s not what we’re about. Not here in America, not anywhere else in the world. Everyone deserves to live a life presumed innocent until proven guilty, and everyone deserves the chance to stand up for themselves or reform their lives. If you agree, lay down your weapons and surrender. Do the right thing for the safety of your nation and every person on this planet. Help make a better, more just world. And if you disagree...then know that Captain America will always be your enemy, and will always be hunting you down.”

He lifts his finger from the button. He’s done. SHIELD is done. He’s exhausted.

Fury chooses this, of all times, to pipe up, because of course he was listening in to that whole speech.

“Did you just disband my entire organization,” he asks in a dangerous deadpan, as if he has any leverage in this situation. “You have no idea what you’ve just done, the danger you’ve just—”

“Fury,” Steve warns, “Shut the hell up. You’re on thin ice,  _ don’t  _ make it worse for yourself.” 

And with that, he pulls out the earpiece. He doesn’t need it anymore, after all. He lets it drop to the floor, where he grinds it into dust under his foot.

He steps out of the control room to leave the facility, but on his way out, he spots the crumpled roll of papers the soldier had pulled from his arm. The notes he supposedly wrote to himself, from a Bucky slowly coming back into himself.

Steve swallows the rock in his throat and picks the papers up as he leaves.

He gathers at the planned rendezvous point so that Natasha, Bucky (slash the soldier, slash whoever he may be), and he can leave and put SHIELD behind them forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Am I the first person to ever have Zola and Bucky waving at each other like "same trauma!!"?
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["Disgustipated" by Tool](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmJYZ1NIn1Y), which already provided the fic's title, but look. _look_. There has never been a more perfect song for a fic. It was absolutely imperative to use it twice.
> 
> New chapters will be posted weekly! If you want, you can find me on tumblr at [uwaaaah](https://uwaaaah.tumblr.com/).


	10. We Remain The Same (I'm Not Sure About That)

Worn boots disturb the dust and overgrown grass as all three of them step out of the car, a sturdy old SUV from the turn of the century that they paid for in cash.

Camp Lehigh has long since been abandoned. It was already a decommissioned base when Steve had last come here, but since the fall of SHIELD, it’s become even more desolate. All the better for them, quite honestly, because the last thing they need to deal with is someone kicking up a fuss about trespassing.

As far as Steve is concerned, this is a homecoming. If not for him, then for Bucky, at least.

Bucky breathes in deep, looking more relaxed than he’s been in months. He wouldn’t admit it, but he even looks rather excited.

“I was born in Shelbyville,” he’d said once a few months ago, when rote memorization from books only just started becoming memories with feelings, “but we must not have lived there for long, because I don’t remember it. But Camp Lehigh? That’s home. That’s where everything started for me.”

Which is why they immediately made plans to come back here. Steve felt it was hardly fair that he’d been able to visit the place Bucky considered home while he hadn’t. 

It’s none too exciting. The buildings are falling into disrepair, covered in rust and mold. Glass windows have been broken in from one too many storms. What used to be dirt paths are now overgrown with vegetation. It looks sad and pathetic and condemned. Steve imagines that seeing his home in such a sorry state must make Bucky feel like Steve had when he’d walked through a completely transformed Lower East Side for the first time.

Time waits for no one. Not the city, not the army base.

Bucky doesn’t seem to care. He wanders through the base with Nat and Steve behind him, switching back and forth between hushed reverence and barely-tempered excitement at things that trigger specific memories. It’s like he’s committing every sight, every sensation to memory. Knowing Bucky and the hard work he’s put into redefining himself, he is.

This place was important to a teenaged Bucky, so it’s important to him. Being here is yet another in a long line of reclamations.

They walk by a broken down Jeep and Bucky lights up. “This looks just like the one the boys drove to take me to a dance club after I strongarmed the sergeant into letting me go!” He places a hand on the rusted hood with a fond smile that grows wicked when he turns back to Nat and Steve. “They learned their lesson after the little bar fight I started.”

Steve guffaws. “You started a  _ bar fight _ ?” He shouldn’t be surprised, but, well, he hadn’t thought that Bucky’s reckless streak had extended past his costumed years into his childhood. In hindsight, that might have been foolish of him.

Bucky nods, and then furrows his brow. “Yeah. I think...I think that was the start of everything, actually.” 

Every day, Bucky learns something new about himself, and Steve learns something new about Bucky. It’s an interesting process of rediscovery, of negotiation of memories. Of what was real and what wasn’t, of what lacked context, of how they each feel about the past.

“Please, you just want to make your bad habits sound noble,  _ Zimochka _ ,” Natasha teases. Bucky laughs, good-natured and carefree. How had Steve ever believed the Winter Soldier’s act, when he never laughed quite like this? It’s so quintessentially Bucky, it’s hard to imagine him without it.

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t true,  _ Natalyushka _ ,” he replies in kind. He says her name with those soft touches Russian apparently has. Both Nat and Bucky have tried to teach him to sound them out, but he can’t wrap his head or his tongue around them.

Personally, Steve can’t imagine how Bucky can bear to be called a name derived from the Winter Soldier title forced on him through brainwashing and torture. Especially not after Bucky went through that period of name experimentation, trying out “James” and “Jim” and even “Jack” as a complete departure; he wasn’t sure what name he wanted to use, now that he was a different person. But eventually he settled on “Bucky” because, as he once told Steve with a vicious grin, every time he uses that name is a magnificent “fuck you” to everyone who tried to burn it out of him. 

But Steve recognizes that “Zimochka” and “Natalyushka” are between just the two of them—a token, a reminder, of the history they share. Just like how Steve and Bucky have their own tics to their relationship that no one else will quite be able to parse, forged in the tents and the mud and the snow all across Europe. 

It’s been nearly a year since Insight and SHIELD. In the immediate aftermath, they released Fury and stayed in a nearby town to keep a close eye on both him and the remnants of SHIELD as a whole. They wanted to make sure nobody makes a power grab in the vacuum to try and reestablish the organization, and if someone did, they needed to be close enough, on the pulse enough, to put an end to it before it’s too big to stop. They also leaked to the press all the information about SHIELD—its organizational structure, what role it played domestically and on the world stage, and all the ugly details of Project Insight.

Except for information on the Winter Soldier. Bucky wanted to maintain his privacy, at least for now, and Steve and Nat easily agreed. 

Now, with the public outcry against SHIELD and the ensuing scandals, no one is going to try rebuilding it anytime soon. Whether something else will take SHIELD’s place in a similar vein, though, is another issue entirely that they are also monitoring. Right now Maria Hill, a former SHIELD agent, looks to be the most likely to start something, but it’s unclear. Steve remembers Hill, worked with her a few times. She seemed nice with a reasonable head on her shoulders. But that’s what he thought about Fury, too. He’s not sure he can trust anyone who worked at SHIELD in any capacity anymore, outside of Nat and Bucky.

(Maybe all three of them now have their own secret nuances to a relationship forged in fire.)

So they have plenty of time now to travel to places like Camp Lehigh and figure out what it is, exactly, they’ll be doing next.

Steve and Bucky take the chance to visit the graves of their long lost friends, both in New York and in Arlington. Where the Winter Soldier denied a chance to visit Toro’s grave, Bucky now jumps at it, partially out of a sense of guilt and obligation for denying earlier, and partially to honor a friend, even if he can barely remember the sound of his voice. They visit Becca Barnes once more, and while she seems to be unaware of any change in her brother, Bucky comes out crying, insisting in a choked voice that, “shut up, he just has something in his eye.” They visit the remaining two of the Young Allies, Wash Jones and Pat O’Toole, in their retirement home and even if two of them are on their deathbeds and one barely remembers them at all, it feels like old times—just friends shooting the shit, taking the piss, and telling the most wildly exaggerated stories of knocking out Nazis that they can manage. They even manage to wrangle an ‘Invaders reunion’ of sorts, getting Jim Hammond and even Namor to show up for an afternoon.

Natasha tags along for it all. They offer plenty of times to let her take the lead on their plans, take her to places and people only she knows, or to even split up so she can go on her own if she feels uncomfortable with Steve and Bucky coming along. But she declines them all. The sad truth that Natasha realizes is that she’s never really had a relationship or a place all her own, separate from her work. Every relationship she can remember, aside from those few distant years before the Red Room took her, was always forged through work and sometimes, in the case of her former ‘husband’, forced upon her. Even her friends, she realized, were really more just coworkers she got along with amicably. Especially because she always had another agenda, another plan, some other tidbit of information, that meant she was always lying to them. What measure is a friendship, when they don’t even know the real you? (What measure is a friendship, when even  _ you  _ don’t know the real you?)

Natasha Romanova, in this past year, discovered that she has almost never had a real friendship and barely even knows herself, and felt deeply lonely for it.

So even though she has no friends or places to visit of her own, she is more than happy to tag along with Steve and Bucky, reckoning with and rebuilding their sense of the world, and enjoying it wholeheartedly. She has no agenda now, no cards to play close to her chest. Her demons have been exorcised and she is free, and for the first time in as long as she can remember, her grins and her laughter and her annoyance and everything in between is fully, truly genuine. She tries new ice cream flavors and dares the boys to see who can hold out the longest before getting brain freeze. She buys the biggest, dumbest sunhat she can find at every rest stop and lets them blow off her head when she sticks her head out the window as they go 100 on I-90. It feels silly and stupid, and it’s that’s exactly what makes it the most fun she’s ever had.

What does the future hold from here? None of them really know, and although they’d never admit it out loud, they are all somewhat scared to settle on any particular thing. None of them feel comfortable working for a government agency in any capacity anymore, so maybe they’ll just...hit the road, keep an ear to the ground, and expose or take down any bad guys or corrupt organizations or who knows what else as they go. It might not be the best plan, but it’s what they’ve got for now as they all three rebuild their sense of trust, and for Bucky, his sense of self as well. 

The past is dead and everything is different now, exactly as it should be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zimochka = a further diminutive of Zimka. Natalyushka = a further diminutive of Natalya/Natasha. They're basically teasing one another with disgustingly cutesy pet names.
> 
> Chapter title comes from ["Pups to Dust" by Modest Mouse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMDS3vnnZDA). For anyone who's interested (and has GOOD TASTE), [here is a playlist of all the songs referenced in this fic](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxXJX_3_FdVlzQMhVUueJRdxl7c3o_Fp2), plus a couple I couldn't squeeze in.
> 
> Thank you for reading, everyone! I've had this fic idea in my head since 2014 and I kept hoping someone else would write something like it, because I had no idea how to build a story out of the basic premise. But then, a month into quarantine, I realized sometimes, you just have to feed yourself, and I forced myself into coming up with an actual story for it. This is the first fic I've written and posted since like 2013 maybe, and is certainly the longest one I've ever completed. I hope you all enjoyed it.


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